Long after this first interview, Miss Elliot showed Miss Carpenter’s photograph to the Master of Balliol, without telling him whom it represented. After looking at it carefully, he remarked, “This is the portrait of a person who lives under high moral excitement.” There could not be a truer summary of her habitual state.

Our days were very much alike, and “Sunday shone no Sabbath-day” for us. Our little household consisted of one honest girl (a certain excellent Marianne, who I often see now in her respectable widowhood and who well deserves commemoration) and two little convicted thieves from the Red Lodge. We assembled for prayers very early in the morning; and breakfast, during the winter months, was got over before daylight; Miss Carpenter always remarking brightly as she sat down, “How cheerful!” was the gas. After this there were classes at the different schools, endless arrangements and organisations, the looking-up of little truants from the Ragged Schools, and a good deal of business in the way of writing reports and so on. Altogether, nearly every hour of the day and week was pretty well mapped out, leaving only space for the brief dinner and tea; and at nine or ten o’clock at night, when we met at last, Miss Carpenter was often so exhausted that I have seen her fall asleep with the spoon half-way between her mouth and the cup of gruel which she ate for supper. Her habits were all of the simplest and most self-denying kind. Both by temperament and on principle she was essentially a Stoic. She had no sympathy at all with Asceticism (which is a very different thing, and implies a vivid sense of the attractiveness of luxury), and she strongly condemned fasting, and all such practices on the Zoroastrian principle, that they involve a culpable weakening of powers which are intrusted to us for good use. But she was an ingrained Stoic, to whom all the minor comforts of life are simply indifferent, and who can scarcely even recognise the fact that other people take heed of them. She once, with great simplicity, made to me the grave observation that at a country house where she had just passed two or three days, “the ladies and gentlemen all came down dressed for dinner, and evidently thought the meal rather a pleasant part of the day!” For herself (as I often told her) she had no idea of any Feast except that of the Passover, and always ate with her loins girded and her umbrella at hand, ready to rush off to the Red Lodge, if not to the Red Sea. In vain I remonstrated on the unwholesomeness of the practice, and entreated on my own behalf to be allowed time to swallow my food, and also some food (in the shape of vegetables) to swallow, as well as the perpetual, too easily ordered, salt beef and ham. Next day after an appeal of this kind (made serious on my part by threats of gout), good Miss Carpenter greeted me with a complacent smile on my entry into our little dining-room. “You see I have not forgotten your wish for a dish of vegetables!” There, surely enough, on a cheeseplate, stood six little round radishes! Her special chair was a horsehair one with wooden arms, and on the seat she had placed a small square cushion, as hard as a board, likewise covered with horsehair. I took this up one day, and taunted her with the Sybaritism it betrayed; but she replied, with infinite simplicity, “Yes, indeed! I am sorry to say that since my illness I have been obliged to have recourse to these indulgencies (!). I used to try, like St. Paul, to ‘endure hardness.’”

Her standard of conscientious rigour was even, it would appear, applicable to animals. I never saw a more ludicrous little scene than when she one day found my poor dog Hajjin, a splendid grey Pomeranian, lying on the broad of her very broad back, luxuriating on the rug before a good fire. After gravely inspecting her for some moments, Miss Carpenter turned solemnly away, observing, in a tone of deep moral disapprobation, “Self-indulgent dog!”

Much of our work lay in a certain Ragged School in a filthy lane named St. James’ Back, now happily swept from the face of the earth. The long line of Lewin’s Mead beyond the chapel was bad enough, especially at nine or ten o’clock of a winter’s night, when half the gas lamps were extinguished, and groups of drunken men and miserable women were to be found shouting, screaming and fighting before the dens of drink and infamy of which the street consisted. Miss Carpenter told me that a short time previously some Bow Street constables had been sent down to this place to ferret out a crime which had been committed there, and that they reported there was not in all London such a nest of wickedness as they had explored. The ordinary Bristol policemen were never to be seen at night in Lewin’s Mead, and it was said they were afraid to show themselves in the place. But St. James’ Back was a shade, I think, lower than Lewin’s Mead; at all events it was further from the upper air of decent life; and in these horrid slums that dauntless woman had bought some tumble-down old buildings and turned them into schools—day-schools for girls and night-schools for boys, all the very sweepings of those wretched streets.

It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently before the large school-gallery in this place, teaching, singing, and praying with the wild street boys, in spite of endless interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles into hats on the table behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out “Amen” in the middle of the prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing, like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes, down from the gallery, round the great schoolroom and down the stairs, out into the street. These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour and, what seemed to me more marvellous still, she heeded, apparently, not at all the indescribable abomination of the odours of a tripe-and-trotter shop next door, wherein operations were frequently carried on which, together with the bouquet du peuple of the poor little unkempt scholars, rendered the school of a hot summer’s evening little better than the ill-smelling giro of Dante’s “Inferno.” These trifles, however, scarcely even attracted Mary Carpenter’s attention, fixed as it was on the possibility of “taking hold” (as she used to say) of one little urchin or another, on whom, for the moment her hopes were fixed.

The droll things which daily occurred in these schools, and the wonderful replies received from the scholars to questions testing their information, amused her intensely, and the more unruly were the young scamps, the more, I think, in her secret heart, she liked them, and gloried in taming them. She used to say, “Only to get them to use the school comb is something!” There was the boy who defined Conscience to me as “a thing a gen’elman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.” There was the boy who, sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on “Thankfulness,”—wherein I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as subjects for praise,—was interrogated as to which pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of the year? replied candidly, “Cock-fightin’, ma’am. There’s a pit up by the ‘Black Boy’ as is worth anythink in Brissel!”

The clergy troubled us little. One day an impressive young curate entered and sat silent, sternly critical to note what heresies were being instilled into the minds of his flock. “I am giving a lesson on Palestine,” I said; “I have just been at Jerusalem.” “In what sense?” said the awful young man, darkly discerning some mysticism (of the Swedenborgian kind, perhaps) beneath the simple statement. The boys who were dismissed from the school for obstreperous behaviour were a great difficulty to us, usually employing themselves in shouting and hammering at the door. One winter’s night when it was raining heavily, as I was passing through Lewin’s Mead, I was greeted by a chorus of voices, “Cob-web, Cob-web!” emanating from the depths of a black archway. Standing still under my umbrella, and looking down the cavern, I remarked, “Don’t you think I must be a little tougher than a cobweb to come out such a night as this to teach such little scamps as you?”

“Indeed you is, Mum; that’s true! And stouter too!”

“Well, don’t you think you would be more comfortable in that nice warm schoolroom than in this dark, cold place?”

“Yes, ’m, we would.”

“You’ll have to promise to be tremendously good, I can tell you, if I bring you in again. Will you promise?”

Vows of everlasting order and obedience were tendered; and, to Miss Carpenter’s intense amusement, I came into St. James’ Back, followed by a whole troop of little outlaws reduced to temporary subjection. At all events they never shouted “Cob-web” again. Indeed, at all times the events of the day’s work, if they bordered on the ludicrous (as was often the case), provoked her laughter till the tears ran down her cheeks. One night she sat grieving over a piece of ingratitude on the part of one of her teachers, and told me she had given him some invitation for the purpose of conciliating him and “heaping coals of fire on his head.” “It will take another scuttle, my dear friend,” I remarked; and thereupon her tears stopped, and she burst into a hearty fit of laughter. Next evening she said to me dolorously, “I tried that other scuttle, but it was no go!”

Of course, like every mortal, Mary Carpenter had les défauts de ses qualités. Her absorption in her work always blinded her to the fact that other people might possibly be bored by hearing of it incessantly.

In India, I have been told that a Governor of Madras observed, after her visit, “It is very astonishing; I listened to all Miss Carpenter had to tell me, but when I began to tell her what I knew of this country, she dropped asleep.” Indeed, the poor wearied and over-worked brain, when it had made its effort, generally collapsed, and in two or three minutes, after “holding you with her eye” through a long philanthropic history, Miss Carpenter might be seen to be, to all intents and purposes, asleep.

On one occasion, that most loveable old man, Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, came to pass two or three days at Red Lodge House, and Miss Carpenter was naturally delighted to take him about and show him her schools and explain everything to him. Mr. May listened with great interest for a time, but at last his attention flagged and two or three times he turned to me; “When can we have our talk, which Theodore Parker promised me?” “Oh, by and by,” Miss Carpenter always interposed; till one day, after we had visited St. James’ Back, we arrived all three at the foot of the tremendous stairs, almost like those of the Trinità, which then existed in Bristol, and were called the Christmas Steps. “Now, Mr. May and Miss Cobbe” (said Mary Carpenter, cheerfully), “you can have your talk.” And so we had—till we got to the top, when she resumed the guidance of the conversation. Good jokes were often made of this little weakness, but it had its pathetic side. Never was there a word of real egotism in her eager talk, or the evidence of the slightest wish to magnify her own doings, or to impress her hearers with her immense share in the public benefits she described. It was her deep conviction that to turn one of these poor sinners from the errors of its ways, to reach to the roots of the misery and corruption of the “perishing and dangerous classes,” was the most important work which could possibly be undertaken; and she, very naturally, in consequence made it the most prominent, indeed, almost the sole, subject of discourse. I was once in her company at Aubrey House in London, when there happened to be present half-a-dozen people, each one devoted to some special political, religious or moral agitation. Miss Carpenter remarked in a pause in the conversation; “It is a thousand pities that everybody will not join and give the whole of their minds to the great cause of the age, because, if they would, we should carry it undoubtedly.” “What is the great cause of the age?” we simultaneously exclaimed. “Parliamentary Reform?” said our host, Mr. Peter Taylor; “the Abolition of Slavery?” said Miss Remond, a Negress, Mrs. Taylor’s companion; “Teetotalism?” said another; “Woman’s Suffrage?” said another; “The conversion of the world to Theism?” said I. In the midst of the clamour, Miss Carpenter looked serenely round, “Why! the Industrial Schools Bill of course!” Nobody enjoyed the joke, when we all began to laugh, more than the reformer herself.

It was, above all, in the Red Lodge Reformatory that Mary Carpenter’s work was at its highest. The spiritual interest she took in the poor little girls was, beyond words, admirable. When one of them whom she had hoped was really reformed fell back into thievish or other evil ways, her grief was a real vicarious repentance for the little sinner; a Christ-like sentiment infinitely sacred. Nor was she at all blind to the children’s defects, or easily deceived by the usual sham reformations of such institutions. In one of her letters to me she wrote these wise words (July 9th, 1859):—

“I have pointed out in one of my reports why I have more trouble than others (e.g., especially, Catholics). A system of steady repression and order would make them sooner good scholars; but then I should not have the least confidence in the real change of their characters. Even with my free system in the Lodge, remember how little we knew of Hill’s and Hawkins’ real characters, until they were in the house? (Her own private house). I do not object to nature being kept under curbs of rule and order for a time, until some principles are sufficiently rooted to be appealed to. But then it must have play, or we cannot possibly tell what amount of reformation has taken place. The Catholics have an enormous artificial help in their religion and priests; but I place no confidence in the slavish obedience they produce and the hypocrisy which I have generally found inseparable from Catholic influence. I would far rather have M. A. M’Intyre coolly say, ‘I know it was wrong’” (a barring and bolting out) “and Anne Crooks in the cell for outrageous conduct, acknowledge the same—‘I know it was wrong, but I am not sorry,’ than any hypocritical and heartless acknowledgments.”

Indeed nobody had a keener eye to detect cant of any kind, or a greater hatred of it. She told me one day of her visit to a celebrated institution, said to be supported semi-miraculously by answers to prayer in the specific shape of cheques. Miss Carpenter said that she asked the matron (or some other official) whether it was supported by voluntary subscriptions? “Oh, dear no! madam,” the woman replied; “Do you not know it is entirely supported by Prayer?” “Oh, indeed,” replied Miss Carpenter. “I dare say, however, when friends have once been moved to send you money, they continue to do so regularly?” “Yes, certainly they do.” “And they mostly send it at the beginning of the year?” “Yes, yes, very regularly.” “Ah, well,” said Miss Carpenter, “when people send me money for Red Lodge under those circumstances, I enter them in my Reports as Annual Subscribers!”

When our poor children at last left the Reformatory, Mary Carpenter always watched their subsequent career with deep interest, gloried in receiving intelligence that they were behaving honestly and steadily, or deplored their backslidings in the contrary event. In short, her interest was truly in the children themselves, in their very souls; and not (as such philanthropy too often becomes) an interest in her Institution. Those who know most of such work will best understand how wide is the distinction.

But Mary Carpenter was not only the guardian and teacher of the poor young waifs and strays of Bristol when she had caught them in her charity-traps. She was also their unwearied advocate with one Government after another, and with every public man and magistrate whom she could reasonably or unreasonably attack on their behalf. Never was there such a case of the Widow and the Unjust Judge; till at last most English statesmen came to recognise her wisdom, and to yield readily to her pressure, and she was a “power in the State.” As she wrote to me about her Industrial School, so was it in everything else:—

“The magistrates have been lapsing into their usual apathy; so I have got a piece of artillery to help me in the shape of Mr. M. D. Hill.... They have found by painful experience that I cannot be made to rest while justice is not done to these poor children.” (July 6th, 1859.)

And again, some years later, when I had told her I had sat at dinner beside a gentleman who had opposed many of her good projects:—

“I am very sorry you did not see through Mr. ——, and annihilate him! Of course, I shall never rest in this world till the children have their birthrights in this so-called Christian country; but my next mode of attack I have not decided on yet!” (February 13th, 1867.)

At last my residence under Mary Carpenter’s roof came to a close. My health had broken down two or three times in succession under a régime for which neither habit nor constitution had fitted me, and my kind friend, Dr. Symonds’, peremptory orders necessitated arrangements of meals which Miss Carpenter thought would occasion too much irregularity in her little household, which (it must be remembered) was also a branch of the Reformatory work. I also sadly perceived that I could be of no real comfort or service as an inmate of her house, though I could still help her, and perhaps more effectually, by attending her schools while living alone in the neighbourhood. Her overwrought and nervous temperament could ill bear the strain of a perpetual companionship, or even the idea that any one in her house might expect companionship from her; and if, while I was yet a stranger, she had found some fresh interest in my society, it doubtless ceased when I had been a twelvemonth under her roof, and knew everything which she could tell me about her work and plans. As I often told her (more in earnest than she supposed), I knew she would have been more interested in me had I been either more of a sinner or more of a saint!

And so, a few weeks later, the separation was made in all friendliness, and I went to live alone at Belgrave House, Durdham Down, where I took lodgings, still working pretty regularly at the Red Lodge and Ragged Schools, but gradually engaging more in Workhouse visiting and looking after friendless girls, so that my intercourse with Miss Carpenter became less and less frequent, though always cordial and pleasant.

Years afterwards when I had ceased to reside in the neighbourhood of Bristol, I enjoyed several times the pleasure of receiving visits from Miss Carpenter at my home in London, and hearing her accounts of her Indian travels and other interests. In 1877, I went to Clifton to attend an Anti-vivisection meeting, and also one for Woman Suffrage; and at the latter of these I found myself with great pleasure on the same platform with Mary Carpenter. (She was also an Anti-vivisectionist and always signed our Memorials.) Her biographer and nephew, Professor Estlin Carpenter, while fully stating her recognition of the rightfulness of the demand for votes for women and also doing us the great service of printing Mr. Mill’s most admirable letter to her on the subject (Life, p. 493) seems unaware that she ever publicly advocated the cause of political rights for women. But on this occasion, as I have said, she took her place on the platform of the West of England Branch of the Association, at its meeting in the Victoria Rooms; and, in my hearing, either proposed or seconded one of the resolutions demanding the franchise, adding a few words of cordial approval.

Before I returned to London on this occasion I called on Miss Carpenter, bringing with me a young niece. I found her at Red Lodge; and she insisted on my going with her over all our old haunts, and noting what changes and improvements she had made. I was tenderly touched by her great kindness to my young companion and to myself; and by the added softness and gentleness which years had brought to her. She expressed herself as very happy in every way; and, in truth, she seemed to me like one who had reached the Land of Beulah, and for whom there would be henceforth only peace within and around.

A few weeks later I was told that her servant had gone into her bedroom one morning and found her weeping for her brother, Philip Carpenter, of whose death she had just heard. The next morning the woman entered again at the same hour, but Mary Carpenter was lying quite still, in the posture in which she had lain in sleep. Her “six days’ work” was done. She had “gone home,” and I doubt not “ta’en her wages.” Here is the last letter she wrote to me:—

“There are some things of which the most clear and unanswerable reasoning could not convince me! One of these is, that a wise, all powerful and loving Father can create an immortal spirit for eternal misery. Perhaps you are wiser than I and more accessible to arguments (though I doubt this), and I send you the enclosed, which I do not want back. Gógurth’s answer to such people is the best I ever heard—‘If you are child of Devil—good; but I am child of God!’

“I was very glad to get a glimpse of you; I do not trouble you with my doings, knowing that you have enough of your own. You may like to see an abstract of my experience.

And here is a Poem which she gave me in MS. the day she wrote it. I do not think it has seen the light.

The teaching work in the Red Lodge and the Ragged Schools, which I continued for a long time after leaving Miss Carpenter’s house, was not, I have thought on calm reflection in after years, very well done by me. I have always lacked imagination enough to realize what are the mental limitations of children of the poorer classes; and in my eagerness to interest them and convey my thoughts, I know I often spoke over their heads, with too rapid utterance and using too many words not included in their small vocabularies. I think my lessons amused and even sometimes delighted them; I was always told they loved them; but they enjoyed them rather I fear like fireworks than instruction! In the Red Lodge there were fifty poor little girls from 10 to 15 years of age who constituted our prisoners. They were regularly committed to the Lodge as to jail, and when Miss Carpenter was absent I had to keep the great door key. They used to sit on their benches in rows opposite to me in the beautiful black oak-panelled room of the Lodge, and read their dreary books, and rejoice (I have no doubt) when I broke in with explanations and illustrations. Their poor faces, often scarred by disease, and ill-shaped heads, were then lifted up with cheerful looks to me, and I ploughed away as best I could, trying to get any ideas into their minds; in accordance with Mary Carpenter’s often repeated assurance that anything whatever which could pass from my thoughts to theirs would be a benefit, as supplying other pabulum than their past familiarity with all things evil. When we had got through one school reading book in this way I begged Miss Carpenter to find me another to afford a few fresh themes for observations, but no; she preferred that I should go over the same again. Some of the children had singular histories. There was one little creature named Kitty, towards whom I confess my heart warmed especially, for her leonine disposition! Whenever there was some mischief discovered and the question asked Who was in fault? invariably Kitty’s hand went up: “I did it, ma’am;” and the penalty, even of incarceration in a certain dreaded “cell,” was heroically endured. Kitty had been duly convicted at Sessions at the mature age of ten. Of what high crime and misdemeanour does the reader suppose? Pilfering, perhaps, a pocket handkerchief, or a penny? Not at all! Of nothing less than Horse-stealing! She and her brother, a mite two years younger than herself, were dispatched by their vagabond parents to journey by one road, while they themselves travelled by another, and on the way the children, who were, of course, directed to pick and steal all they could lay hands on, observed an old grey mare feeding in a field near the road and reflecting that a ride on horseback would be preferable to their pilgrimage on foot, they scrambled on the mare’s back and by some means guided her down the road and went off in triumph. The aggrieved farmer to whom the mare belonged, brought the delinquents to justice, and after being tried with all the solemn forms of British law (their heads scarcely visible over the dock), the children were sent respectively to a Boy’s Reformatory, and to Red Lodge. We kept Kitty, of course, till her full term expired when she was 15, and I am afraid Miss Carpenter strained the law a little in detaining her still longer to allow her to gain more discretion before returning to those dreadful tramps, her parents. She herself, indeed, felt the danger as she grew older, and attached herself much to us both. A teacher whom I had imported from Ireland (one of my own village pupils from Donabate) told me that Kitty spoke of us with tears, and that she had seen her one day, when given a stocking of mine whereupon to practise darning, furtively kissing it when she thought no one was observing her. She once said, “God bless Exeter jail! I should never have been here but for that.” But at last, like George Eliot’s Gipsy, the claims of race over-mastered all her other feelings. Kitty left us to rejoin her mother, who had perpetually called to see her; and a month or two later the poor child died of fever, caught in the wretched haunts of her family.

In a visit which I made to Red Lodge two years ago, I was struck by the improved physical aspect of the poor girls in the charge of our successors. The depressed, almost flattened form of head which the experienced eye of Sir Walter Crofton had caught (as I did), as a terrible “Note” of hereditary crime, was no longer visible; nor was the miserable blear-eyed, scrofulous appearance of the faces of many of my old pupils to be seen any more. Thirty years have, I hope and believe, raised even the very lowest stratum of the population of England.

Miss Carpenter’s work in founding the first Reformatory for girl-criminals with the munificent aid of that generous woman Lady Byron, has beyond question, contributed in no mean degree to thinning the ranks of female crime during the last quarter of a century. Issuing from the Red Lodge at the end of their four or five years’ term of confinement and instruction, the girls rarely returned, like poor Kitty, to their parents, but passed first through a probation as Miss Carpenter’s own servants in her private house, under good Marianne and her successors, and then into that humbler sort of domestic service which is best for girls of their class; I mean that wherein the mistress works and takes her meals with the servant. The pride and joy of these girls when they settled into steady usefulness was often a pleasure to witness. Miss Carpenter used to say, “When I hear one of them talk of ‘My Kitchen,’ I know it is all right!” Of course many of them eventually married respectably. On the whole I do not think that more than five, or at the outside ten per cent. fell into either crime or vice after leaving Red Lodge, and if we suppose that there have been something like 500 girls in the Reformatory since Lady Byron bought the Red Lodge and dedicated it to that benevolent use, we may fairly estimate, that Mary Carpenter deflected towards goodness the lives of at least four hundred and fifty women, who, if she had not stirred in their interest, would almost inevitably have spent their days in crime or vice, and ended them either in jail or in the “Black Ward” of the workhouse.

There is an epitaph on a good clergyman in one of the old churches of Bristol which I have always thought remarkably fine. It runs thus as far as I remember:—

We do not, in our day (unless we happen to belong to the Salvation Army) talk much about “saving souls” in the old Evangelical sense; and I, at least, hold very strongly, and have even preached to the purpose, that every human soul is “Doomed to be Saved,” destined by irrevocable Divine love and mercy to be sooner or later, in this world or far off worlds to come, brought like the Prodigal to the Father’s feet. But there is a very real sense in which a true philanthropist “saves” his fellow-men from moral evil—the sense in which Plutarch uses the word, and which every theology must accept, and in this sense I unhesitatingly affirm, that Mary Carpenter SAVED four hundred human souls.

It must be borne in mind also that it was not only in her own special Reformatory that her work was carried on. By advocating in her books and by her active public pleading the modification of the laws touching juvenile crime, she practically originated—in concert with Recorder Hill—the immense improvement which has taken place in the whole treatment of young criminals who, before her time, were simply sent to jail, and there too often stamped with the hallmark of crime for life.

As regards the other part of Miss Carpenter’s work which she permitted me to share,—the Ragged Schools and Streetboys’ Sunday School in St. James’s Back,—I laboured, of course, under the same disadvantage as in the Red Lodge of never clearly foreseeing how much would be understood of my words or ideas; and what would be most decidedly “caviar to the general.” A ludicrous example of this occurred on one occasion. I always anxiously desired to instil into the minds of the children admiration for brave and noble deeds, and therefore told them stories of heroism whenever my subject afforded an opening for one. Having to give a lesson on France, and some boy asking a question about the Guillotine, I narrated, as vivaciously and dramatically as I knew how, the beautiful tale of the Nuns who chanted the Te Deum on the scaffold, till one voice after another was silenced for ever, and the brave Abbess still continued to sing the grand old hymn of Ambrose, till her turn came for death. I fondly hoped that some of my own feelings in describing the scene were communicated to my audience. But such hopes were dashed when, a day or two later, Miss Carpenter came home from her lesson at the school, and said: “My dear friend, what in the name of heaven can you have been teaching those boys? They were all excited about some lesson you had given them. They said you described cutting off a lot of heads; and it was ‘chop! and a head fell into the basket; and chop! another head in the basket! They said it was such a nice lesson!’ But whose heads were cut off, or why, none of them remembered,—only chop! and a head fell in the basket!”

I consoled myself, however, for this and many another defeat by the belief that if my lessons did not much instruct their wild pates, their hearts were benefitted in some small measure by being brought under my friendly influence. Miss Carpenter always made the schoolmaster of the Day School attend at our Sunday Night-School, fearing some wild outbreak of the 100 and odd boys and hobbledehoys who formed our congregation. The first Sunday, however, on which the school was given into my charge, I told the schoolmaster he might leave me and go home; and I then stopped alone (we had no assistants) with the little herd. My lessons, I am quite sure, were all the more impressive; and though Miss Carpenter was quite alarmed when she heard what I had done, she consented to my following my own system of confidence, and I never had reason to repent the adoption of it.

In my humble judgment (and I know it was also that of one much better able to judge, Lord Shaftesbury) these elastic and irregular Ragged Schools were far better institutions for the class for whom they were designed than the cast-iron Board Schools of our time. They were specially designed to civilize the children: to tame them enough to induce them, for example, to sit reasonably still on a bench for half-an-hour at a time; to wash their hands and faces; to comb their hair; to forbear from shouting, singing, “turning wheels,” throwing marbles, making faces, or similarly disporting themselves, while in school; after which preliminaries they began to acquire the art of learning lessons. It was not exactly Education in the literary sense, but it was a Training, without which as a substructure the “Three R’s” are of little avail,—if we may believe in William of Wykeham’s axiom that “Manners makyth Manne.”

Another, and, as I think, great merit of the Ragged School system was, that decent and self-respecting parents who strove to keep their children from the contamination of the gutter and were willing to pay their penny a week to send them to school, were not obliged, as now, to suffer their boys and girls to associate in the Board Schools with the very lowest and roughest of children fresh from the streets. Nothing has made me more indignant than a report I read some time ago in one of the newspapers of a poor widow who had “seen better days,” being summoned and fined for engaging a non-certified poor governess to teach her little girl, rather than allow the child to attend the Board School and associate with the girls she would meet there. As if all the learning of a person, if he could pour it into a child’s brain, would counterbalance in a young girl’s mind the foul words and ideas familiar to the hapless children of the “perishing and dangerous classes!”

People talk seriously of the physical infection which may be conveyed where many young children are gathered in close contiguity. They would, if they knew more, much more anxiously deprecate the moral contagion which may be introduced into a school by a single girl who has been initiated into the mysteries of a vicious home. On two separate occasions Miss Carpenter and I were startled by what I can only describe as a portentous wave of evil which passed over the entire community of 50 girls in the Red Lodge. In each case it was undeniably traceable to the arrival of new comers who had been sent by mistake of magistrates to our Reformatory when they ought to have gone to a Penitentiary. It was impossible for us to guess how, with all the watchful guardianship of the teachers, these unhappy girls had any opportunity for corrupting their companions, but that they did so (temporarily only, as they were immediately discovered and banished) I saw with my own eyes beyond possibility of mistake.

It came to me as part of my work with Miss Carpenter to visit the homes of all the children who attended our Ragged Schools—either Day Schools or Night Schools; nominally to see whether they belonged to the class which should properly benefit by gratuitous education, but also to find out whether I could do anything to amend their condition. Many were the lessons I learned respecting the “short” but by no means “simple” annals of the poor, when I made those visits all over the slums of Bristol.

The shoemakers were a very numerous and a very miserable class among the parents of our pupils. When anything interfered with trade they were at once thrown into complete idleness and destitution. Over and over again I tried to get the poor fellows, when they sat listless and lamenting, to turn to any other kind of labour in their own line; to endeavour, e.g., to make slippers for me, no matter how roughly, or to mend my boots; promising similar orders from friends. Not one would, or could, do anything but sew upper or under leathers, as the case might be! The men sat all day long when there was work, sewing in their stuffy rooms with their wives busy washing or attending to the children, and the whole place in a muddle; but they would converse eagerly and intelligently with me about politics or about other towns and countries, whereas the poor over-worked women would never join in our talk. When I addressed them they at once called my attention to Jenny’s torn frock and Tom’s want of a new cap. One of these shoemakers, in whom I felt rather special interest, turned to me one day, looked me straight in the face, and said: “I want to ask you a question. Why does a lady like you come and sit and talk to me?” I thought it a true token of confidence, and was glad I could answer honestly that I had come first to see about his children, but now came because I liked him.

Other cases which came to my knowledge in these rounds were dreadfully sad. In one poor room I found a woman who had been confined only a few days, sitting up in bed doing shopwork, her three or four little children all endeavouring to work likewise for the miserable pay. Her husband was out looking vainly for work. She showed me a sheaf of pawntickets for a large quantity of table and house linen and plated goods. Her husband and she had formerly kept a flourishing inn, but the railway had ruined it, and they had been obliged to give it up and come to live in Bristol, and get such work as they could do—at starvation wages. She was a gentle, delicate, fair woman, who had been lady’s maid in a wealthy family known to me by name. I asked her did she not go out and bring the children to the Downs on a Sunday? “Ah! we tried it once or twice,” she said, “but it was too terrible coming back to this room; we never go now.”

Another case of extreme poverty was less tragic. There was a woman with three children whose husband was a soldier in India, to whom she longingly hoped to be eventually sent out by the military authorities. Meanwhile she was in extreme poverty in Bristol, and so was her friend, a fine young Irish woman. Their sole resource was a neighbour who possessed a pair of good sheets, and was willing to lend them to them by day, provided they were restored for her own use every night! This did not appear a very promising source of income, but the two friends contrived to make it one. They took the sheets of a morning to a pawnbroker who allowed them,—I think it was two shillings, upon them. With this they stocked a basket with oranges, apples, gooseberries, pins and needles, match boxes, lace,—anything which could be had for such a price, according to the season. Then one or other of the friends arrayed herself in the solitary bonnet and shawl which they possessed between them, and sallied out for the day to dispose of her wares, while the other remained in their single room to take care of the children. The evening meal was bought and brought home by the outgoing friend with the proceeds of her day’s sales, and then the sheets were redeemed from pawn at the price of a half-penny each day and gratefully restored to the proprietor. This ingenious mode of filling five mouths went on, with a little help, when I came to know of it, in the way of a fresh-filled basket—for a whole winter. I thought it so curious that I described it to dear Harriet St. Leger one day when she was passing through Bristol and spent some hours with me. She was affected almost to tears and pushed into my hand, at the last moment at the Station, all the silver in her purse, to give to the friends. The money amounted to 7s. 6d., and when Harriet was gone I hastened to give it to the poor souls. It proved to be one of the numerous occasions in life in which I have experienced a sort of fatality, as if the chance of doing a bit of good to somebody were offered to us by Providence to take or leave and, if we postpone taking it, the chance is lost. I was tired, and the room inhabited by the poor women was, as it happened, at the other end of Bristol, and I could not indulge myself with a fly, but I reflected that the money now really belonged to them, and I was bound to take it to them without delay. When I reached their room I found I was in the very nick of time. An order had come for the soldier’s wife to present herself at some military office next day with her children, and with a certain “kit” of clothes and utensils for the voyage, and if all were right she would be sent to join her husband’s regiment in India by a vessel to sail immediately. Without the proper outfit she would not have been taken; and of course the poor soul had no kit and was in an agony of anxiety. Harriet’s gift, with some trifling addition, happily supplied all that was wanted.

I did not see so much of drunkenness in Bristol as the prominence given to the subject by many philanthropists led me to expect. Of course I came across terrible cases of it now and then, as for example a little boy of ten at our Ragged School who begged Miss Carpenter to let him go home at mid-day, and on enquiry, it proved that he wanted to release his mother, whom he had locked in, dead-drunk, at nine in the morning. I also had a frightful experience of the case of the drunken wife of a poor man dying of agonizing cancer. The doctor who attended him told me that a little brandy was the only thing to help him, and I brought small quantities to him frequently, till, when I was leaving home for three weeks, I thought it best to give a whole bottle to his wife under injunctions to administer it by proper degrees. Happening to pass by the door of the wretched couple a day later, before I started, I saw a small crowd, and asked what had happened? “Mrs. Whale had been drinking and had fallen down stairs and broken her neck and was dead.” Horror-struck I mounted the almost perpendicular stair and found it was so; the poor hapless husband was still alive, and my empty brandy bottle was on the table.

The other great form of vice however was thrust much more often on my notice—the ghastly ruin of the wretched girls who fell into it and the nameless damnation of the hags and Jews who traded on their souls and bodies. The cruelty of the fate of some of the young women was often piteous. Thankful I am that the law for assaults has been made since those days far more stringent and is oftener put in force. There were stories which came to my personal knowledge which would draw tears from many eyes were I to tell them, but the more cruel the wrong done, the more difficult it generally proved to induce anybody to undertake to receive the victims into their houses on any terms.

A gentleman whom I met in Italy, who knew Bristol well, told me he had watched a poor young sailor’s destruction under the influence of some of the eighteen hundred miserable women then infesting the city. He had just been paid off and had received £73 for a long service at sea. Mr. Empson first saw him in the fangs of two of the wretched creatures, and next, six weeks later, he found him dying in the Infirmary, having spent every shilling of his money in drink and debauchery. He told Mr. Empson that, after the first week, he had never taken any food at all, but lived only on stimulants.