ed is about six
hundred, besides which there are numerous dry-nurses and teachers for
the older children. It is estimated that the entire expense of
conducting the establishment is not less than five or six hundred
thousand rubles per annum, most of which is defrayed by voluntary
contributions and interest received on loans.

I spent a forenoon rambling through the various wards, and can safely
say I never before saw such an extraordinary collection of human
squabs within one inclosure. It was certainly one of the strangest and
saddest spectacles I had ever witnessed--so many infant specimens of
humanity, bundled up like little packages of merchandise, labeled,
numbered, and nursed with a mathematical regularity fearfully
inconsistent with one's notions of the softness and tenderness of
babyhood. To be sure, they are well treated--kindly and gently
treated, perhaps; but it is pitiful to see these helpless little
creatures bereft of the gentle motherly touch; washed, physicked,
nursed, and too often buried by hired and unsympathizing hands; and no
more thought of them, save in the way of duty, than so many little
animals destitute of souls. The very idea of attachments formed by
nurses is of itself a painful subject of contemplation; for of what
avail is it that a child should be loved by its nurse, or find in her
a new mother, when by the rules of the establishment there must be
constant separations. It is said that over twenty-five thousand
children derive, either directly or indirectly, support from this
establishment. About six thousand are taken in annually, of which
perhaps one fourth die. Many of them are not far from dead when
admitted; and it is only surprising, considering the deprivations they
must endure in being so suddenly withdrawn from the mother's care,
that so large a proportion should survive.

If it be a wise child that knows its own father, it would be a very
remarkable father who could recognize his own child among such a
variegated collection as I saw here. Never upon earth was there a more
astonishing mixture of baby flesh--big babies and little babies,
pug-nosed, black-eyed, blue-eyed, fat and lean, red, yellow, and white
babies--all sorts ever invented or brought to light in this curious
world of ours. Yet the utmost order was observed, and the beds,
nurses, cribs, and feeding apparatus looked wonderfully clean for a
Russian institution, where cleanliness is not generally the prevailing
chara