him until it is accomplished. His rapidity of
speech tells of continual activity of mind. He is essentially a business
man--he needs must be. He takes a waif in hand, and makes a man or woman
of it in a very few years. Why should the child's unparentlike parent
now come forward and claim it once more for a life of misery and
probable crime? Dr. Barnardo thinks long before he would snap the
parental ties between mother and child; but if neglect, cruelty, or
degradation towards her offspring have been the chief evidences of her
relationship, nothing in the wide world would stop him from taking the
little one up and holding it fast.

I sat down to chat over the very wide subject of child rescue in Dr.
Barnardo's cosy room at Stepney Causeway. It was a bitter cold night
outside, the streets were frozen, the snow falling. In an hour's time we
were to start for the slums--to see baby life in the vicinity of Flower
and Dean Street, Brick Lane, and Wentworth Street--all typical
localities where the fourpenny lodging-house still refuses to be
crushed by model dwellings. Over the comforting fire we talked about a
not altogether uneventful past.

Dr. Barnardo was born in 1845, in Dublin. Although an Irishman by birth,
he is not so by blood. He is really of Spanish descent, as his name
suggests.

[Illustration: DR. BARNARDO. _From a Photo by Elliott & Fry._]

"I can never recollect the time," he said, "when the face and the voice
of a child has not had power to draw me aside from everything else.
Naturally, I have always had a passionate love for children. Their
helplessness, their innocence, and, in the case of waif children, their
misery, constitute, I feel, an irresistible appeal to every humane
heart.

"I remember an incident which occurred to me at a very early age, and
which made a great impression upon me.

"One day, when coming home from school, I saw standing on the margin of
the pavement a woman in miserable attire, with a wretched-looking baby
in her arms. I was then only a schoolboy of eleven years old, but the
sight made me very unhappy. I remember looking furtively every way to
see if I was observed, and then emptying my pockets--truly they had not
much in them--into the woman's hands. But sauntering on, I could not
forget the face of the baby--it fascinated me; so I had to go back, and
in a low voice suggested to the woman that if she would follow me home I
would try to get her something more.

"Fortunately