mates had been bitten by a mad dog. We called up the child, who immediately burst out crying, and actually showed us, upon his little arm, the marks of a recent bite. Upon being questioned, however, he gave rather vague answers. He did not remember whether the dog was little or big; and he contradicted himself by informing us, first, that he had been bitten on his way home, and then, on his way back to school. The master proposed taking him to a hospital, and did so; but returned in about half an hour, and, taking me aside, informed me that it was not a dog which had bitten the child. He had thought it best to take him first to his mother, who kept a vegetable stand, and inform her of what had happened; but when he mentioned this the infant began to cry again and refused to go. He said his mother would scold him, and he would rather have his arm burned. The teacher, however, suspecting nothing, insisted on going first to his mother, who, supposing that he was brought home for having been in mischief of some kind, began at once to rate him sharply, and threaten him. The master then told her that her child had been bitten by a dog, and proceeded to show her his arm; whereupon the woman turned furiously upon him, telling him to mind his own business; that the child was hers and she would punish him as she thought fit. It finally came out that it was the mother herself who had bitten the child, beside giving him a whipping, because he had stolen some pastry out of a closet! But the boy would certainly never have mentioned it had he not seen in the visitor's packet of caramels a hopeful chance of getting some profit out of his pain, and, as it were, indemnifying himself therefor.

The habitual reserve of children about the abuse they suffer from their parents is, however, the more remark

able because they are often ungenerously ready to tell upon comrades who have chastised them.

But the most marvellous thing of all about these poor little creatures is their cleverness and quickness of observation, their perfect understanding of the practical side of life. Intellectually. they are inferior to the children of the rich. They are less teachable, less reasonable, less capable of attention. They have none of that wonderful intuition concerning the force of terms which our children display, who take in the meaning of words with the very air they breathe. They are ignorant of all nomenclature; they have no notion how to work out a problem, and they express themselves in strange language. How, indeed, should they be able to construct a sentence, when they do not even know Italian? But in all that pertains to practical management, in all that depends upon simple commonsense, they are extraordinarily apt. There is not one of them who cannot tell you the price of the common articles of food; salt, pasta, rice, beans; hardly one who cannot lay out a few pence with judgment, as well as kindle a fire, prepare broth or mush, cook a meal, sweep a room, make up a bed, and sew up the rents in a garment. It is a pleasant thing to see how eager they generally are to be useful, and to lighten the burden laid upon their parents of their own support, as if they actually kept account of every mouthful that they consumed. They like to be employed in all sorts of ways. In the winter the older children sweep away the snow. On holidays, and sometimes even when school keeps, in spring, they delight to go off into the fields for leaves wherewith to make salads, or edible roots. There was one boy of eleven in the school who used, three times a week, to get up before daylight and drag to the market and bring back laden the cart of a vegetable

Woman. He got ten soldi every time, yet it was not a task imposed upon him by his parents, but one performed purely for his own satisfaction. The eight-yearold sister of one of the pupils, distressed by the straits of the big family at home, went of her own accord and offered herself as messenger to a stationer, who had a shop near the school. He engaged her, and she discharged her duties admirably. But the employment most in favor among the little ones is, oddly enough, that of church chores and general sanctimony! In every parish there are a good many chapels and oratories, and classes in the catechism and the "doctrines," where every attendant receives a mark, and according to the number of marks he can show at the end of the season the child gets a garment, a pair of shoes, or a small sum of money. One little boy told me that he went in one Sunday to two masses, one at five o'clock in the morning, and one at nine, to a catechising, a benediction and two sermons; and it appeared that every one of these functions represented a small emolument either in money or in kind. The parish of St. Anna, for instance, gives to each of these little devotees a pair of shoes on their first communion. The oratory of Don Bosco rewards an assiduous attendant with a hat or a garment of some sort; the English ladies who give instruction in the catechism also give rewards and recommendations to the general charitable association.

But, after all, what the children really like best, as a rule, is to be useful at home. One boy of six used to be called from play by his mother to tend the baby sister, not yet weaned; and he could give the infant its drink and even prepare its food, lighting the fire himself over which to heat the milk for the porridge. It was this same little boy who told me one day, with an air of pride, that he knew what he was

going to give his mother for a present on her birthday. "I'm going to give her some endurmia powders" (a narcotic probably containing opium) "for my little sister!" And when I suggested that such powders were not good for babies, he replied, with the air of an old and experienced wet-nurse, "But when she screams so at night we have to do something!"

On another occasion, going to inquire for a small boy who had been absent from school for some days, I found him in bed with measles, and two younger children with him, all three patients being under the care of a sister of nine. The father was in prison, and the mother, who worked all day in a fac→ tory, could only come back for a few minutes at noon to nurse her youngest child. During all the rest of the day. the nine-year-old sister looked after the infant, hushing it and preparing its pap. But what was positively terrify ing was to see the freedom with which the small nurse handled the campana, as they call it, that is, the scaldino, filled with hot coals, which she thrust in between the straw mattress and the bed-clothes, at the constant risk of set ting fire to the whole establishment. This little girl could neither read nor write, having been only five or six months at school. She had begun to go three years before, but had to be kept at home to play nurse to a younger sister; and only a few months after this one was old enough to be received at an infant asylum there was another for whom she had to perform the same service.

"I have to take care of myself and the others, too," said this child to me. "I can't ever be married, because there are so many babies here!" Strange words, indeed, to fall from the same childish lips which presently confessed that she hardly ever went down into the court "for fear of wanting to play!"

The spur of necessity has so trained

and fitted these little ones for the requirements of practical life that not merely are they able, from their tenderest years, to discharge important home duties, such as our children cannot even conceive of, but they develop a certain business capacity and the power of conducting negotiations of some magnitude. One boy of eight had the entire charge of a boy of six; taught him all he knew, took him to school, to church, and even to the hospital to consult a doctor. There are very few of them who are not capable, at the age of eight or nine, of arranging to have their own names put upon the school or parish registers, obtaining certificates of poverty, or qualifying as candidates for the so-called Alpine Colonies.

A single illustration will show how very remarkably the spirit of initiative and of practicality is often developed in these children. There came to the school a half idiotic boy, residing with some distant relatives, who beat him cruelly, and who used, as was afterwards ascertained, to thrust him out of doors at five o'clock in the winter mornings, before it was light. The child was so utterly stupefied by hunger and ill-treatment that he did not even know enough to complain. His condition was inconceivably miserable. His face was dirty, his hands purple and swollen with chilblains, and he used to sit hugging his books and obstinately refusing to take off his hat and muffler, as though he could never get thoroughly warm even in a genial atmosphere, or indemnify himself for what he had suffered outside. His people must have been extremely brutal, for his fear of them overcame even his dread of the cold, and he was once reduced to sleeping three nights on a bench in the open air in mid-January rather than go back to the house. All this we ascertained, not from himself, but from another child who lived

near him; for there was great excitement and sympathy on his behalf among the poor neighbors, both old and young. The child was invited to eat and sleep with them, and for six or eight days poor Testa was handed about from house to house to his own infinite satisfaction without his hard relatives' asserting any claim to him. Meanwhile the school superintendent had set on foot arrangements for having him received into an institute; but the proceedings dragged, as usual, and the poor families who had come forward so generously, and who were already heavily burdened with their own offspring, found themselves unequal to the extra charge. The poor little waif had been for three days a guest in the house of a classmate named Calla. The latter was a lying, bragging little varlet of nine, but very active and capable, and he devised the following plan. When the three days were over, he resolved that Testa must not fall again into the clutches of his relatives, and undertook, on his own account, to provide the child with a safe refuge. In the morning, instead of going to school, he picked up Testa, with some show of petulance, and boldly bore him off to the City Hall. Arrived at his destination he knew not which way to turn or what staircase to take; but all undiscouraged he made for the first open door, told his story and demanded that something should be done for the child's protection.

A few passers-by stopped to see what was going on, and presently a group had collected about the strange pair, while Calla, perceiving the interest he had excited, exerted all his eloquence to describe the piteous condition of his comrade, until a gentleman, who was also a magistrate (it sounds like a novel, but is perfectly authentic), offered to go with the two children to a session of the Board of Inquiry, where Calla gave all the information necessary for

instituting proceedings to have Testa

immediately placed in an asylum for derelict children. The thing made some noise and got into the papers, which so turned the head of the small hero that for a week afterward he came to school with his garments fairly stuffed with bits of newspaper recounting his glorious deed; and really, when he planted himself before me, with hands thrust into his pockets in the most impudent fashion, but glowing with exultation over the triumphant success of his good deed, I could but think what courage and dash and what a noble spirit of enterprise may sometimes lurk in these little dunderheads, who never get a good mark in their studies, but who, driven by the spur of necessity, have come to understand life as some of the most diligent pupils in our lycées never do.

Nuova Antologia.

Is it not a curious indication of the spirit of the times that we encounter in an infant-school, whose pupils might be supposed to be defended by the mere fact of their tender age from the extreme contrasts of fortune, the phantom of the "social question" in one of its most distressing forms?

And when we come to study this little world, doomed to a childhood of misery which can only be followed by a lifetime of suffering, subjection and passive toil, and find there so many germs of enterprise, independence, courage all that most dignifies humanity-we find ourselves moved, not merely to compassion for the victims of a blind destiny, but to a kind of remorse that such a mass of precious energy should be wasted and made void by the vicious constitution of our society.

Paola Lombroso.

Those who still believe that the English drama has a future have had their faith sorely tried during the last few years. Many who had clung to a hope of its eventual re-birth have sadly accepted the view that, like Paula Tanqueray, it has only a past. No more than a sanguine few continue to rank the theatre as a possible intellectual recreation. Never has so much been spent on gorgeous scenery and upholstery; never was there less of the real stuff of drama. Pinchbeck romance, ineffective frock-coat melodrama, imbecile farce-this is the usual fare that managers are content to offer. Even the patient playgoing public, that has borne so much, is beginning to turn away in bored impatience. Even the big battalions of Mr. Alexander's and

Mr. Martin Harvey's admirers demand something better than "Rupert of Hentzau" and a whitewashed, milk-and-watery Don Juan. Yet, even in these bad times, there is a germ of possible emancipation from the tyranny of the actor manager, from the burden of belief in money as the one thing to be sought after, and (more foolish still) the one thing that can bring success to a play. The proverb tells us, disregarding natural phenomena, that the darkest hour comes before the dawn. Experience translates this into meaning that, the darker the night the more we prize any little gleam which seems to promise day. And even the obscurity that hides the drama has been broken by a ray of light which may give us hope once more.

Things at the worst will cease or else climb upward.

We must have seen the worst "the worst of all worst worsts"-and we cannot think of the drama ceasing. Therefore we naturally look for signs of an upward movement. And a sign we have in a very unlikely quarter. When Mr. Benson announced his season at the Lyceum Theatre, the critics shrugged their shoulders, the public remained more than usual calm. Mr. Benson had very worthy aims; we all knew that, but-and then the negatives had it all their own way. "He was not a good actor himself; he had a company of merely provincial players; he could not possibly stage eight plays even respectably; his rough-and-ready methods were all very well for the country, but the London playgoer, trained to expect 'sumptuous' revivals, would find them sadly inadequate." Yet, see what has happened. In spite of the great difficulties which must hamper a season of this kind-the difficulty of getting the public to know that it is going on, the difficulty of having each week's play ready in time, the difficulty of transplanting players and properties from small country stages into one of the largest theatres in London; in spite of prejudice, in spite of admitted defects in casting some of the principal characters, the venture has been both a material and, on the whole, an artistic success. It was a pity to begin with "Henry the Fifth." It is one of the least interesting of Mr. Benson's own personal performances, and, by leaving out the chorus and ruthlessly cutting the text, he both annoyed the Shakespearean scholar and made it hard for those who did not know the play to follow the action at all. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" I would have opened the series far more favorably. It was not so much like an Empire ballet as Mr. Tree's, but, after

all, the poetry counts for something. Mr. Benson's production was far more poetical and daintily fantastic than the other, and, though the scenery at Her Majesty's is of marvellous beauty, yet the imaginative mind can dispense with a very elaborate mounting. "Hamlet," in its entirety, was an experiment well worth making. For human nature's daily food-especially for workaday human nature the ordinary acting version is sufficient. But it is certainly a help to the understanding of the play to see it acted once without "cuts." Mr. Benson's "Hamlet," too, is a sound and consistent reading, never inspired, but always intelligent and interesting. "Richard II" touched a higher level still. Personally, I should feel grateful to Mr. Benson if this were the only good thing he had done, which is by no means the case. "Twelfth Night". and "Antony and Cleopatra" lowered the average a little, though each had points of interest, in spite of the fact that the leading parts were not well played. "The Tempest" suffered to some extent from a like cause, but it is a great thing to have a chance of seeing a play that is so very seldom acted. As for "The Rivals," it was not taken in the right spirit of irresponsible fun, but stage management could soon infuse into it the kind of bubbling, boyish humor in which Sheridan wrote at twenty-four. This was the tale of productions originally announced.

Here we have seven plays of Shakespeare nearly all adequately played, all adequately mounted, all stage-managed with care and with a not too common reverence for what we believe to have been the poet's aim. Mr. Benson is full of resource, and has a good eye for effect. He also produces the plays because he has a sincere admiration for Shakespeare. We see, in many ways, the difference between his methods and those of the actors-managers who pro