So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and am seriously of opinion that he did an heroic act, and effected more than he dreamed of towards his final salvation, when he took up the loathsome child and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father.  To be sure, we all smiled at him, at the time, but doubtless would have acted pretty much the same in a similar stress of circumstances.  The child, at any rate, appeared to be satisfied with his behavior; for when he had held it a considerable time, and set it down, it still favored him with its company, keeping fast hold of his forefinger till we reached the confines of the place.  And on our return through the court-yard, after visiting another part of the establishment, here again was this same little Wretchedness waiting for its victim, with a smile of joyful, and yet dull recognition about its scabby mouth and in its rheumy eyes.  No doubt, the child’s mission in reference to our friend was to remind him that he was responsible, in his degree, for all the sufferings and misdemeanors of the world in which he lived, and was not entitled to look upon a particle of its dark calamity as if it were none of his concern:  the offspring of a brother’s iniquity being his own blood-relation, and the guilt, likewise, a burden on him, unless he expiated it by better deeds.

All the children in this ward seemed to be invalids, and, going up-stairs, we found more of them in the same or a worse condition than the little creature just described, with their mothers (or more probably other women, for the infants were mostly foundlings) in attendance as nurses.  The matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, remarkably kind and motherly in aspect, was walking to and fro across the chamber—­on that weary journey in which careful mothers and nurses travel so continually and so far, and gain never a step of progress—­with an unquiet baby in her arms.  She assured us that she enjoyed her occupation, being exceedingly fond of children; and, in fact, the absence of timidity in all the little people was a sufficient proof that they could have had no experience of harsh treatment, though, on the other hand, none of them appeared to be attracted to one individual more than another.  In this point they differed widely from the poor child below-stairs.  They seemed to recognize a universal motherhood in womankind, and cared not which individual might be the mother of the moment.  I found their tameness as shocking as did Alexander Selkirk that of the brute subjects of his else solitary kingdom.  It was a sort of tame familiarity, a perfect indifference to the approach of strangers, such as I never noticed in other children.  I accounted for it partly by their nerveless, unstrung state of body, incapable of the quick thrills of delight and fear which play upon the lively harp-strings of a healthy child’s nature, and partly by their woful lack of acquaintance with a private home, and their being therefore destitute of the sweet homebred shyness, which is like the sanctity of heaven about a mother-petted child.  Their condition was like that of chickens hatched in an oven, and growing up without the especial guardianship of a matron-hen:  both the chicken and the child, methinks, must needs want something that is essential to their respective characters.