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Oh! innocent days of itinerant urchinhood, your freshness comes no more; we "move on" as of old waifs in the wide circuit of this nomad life but with the hymns which lulled us in the neglected meeting-house, the prophecies they told us of toil, duty, reverence, and content, have floated into heaven whither our father has gone!
It is a spectral dawn: a wan light, like the light of a dying sun. The wind has waned and veered; the flood sinks slowly back to its abysses abandoning its plunder, scattering its piteous waifs over bar and dune, over shoal and marsh, among the silences of the mango-swamps, over the long low reaches of sand-grasses and drowned weeds, for more than a hundred miles.
But I couldn't really see it, Mag, nor the poor, white-faced, wise-eyed little waifs that have succeeded us, for the tears in my eyes and the ache at my heart and the queer trick the place has of being peopled with you and me, and the boy with the gouged eye, and the cripple, and the rest. He put his gentle thin old arm about my shoulders for a moment when he saw what was the matter with me.
"Does that satisfy you?" he asked sullenly. "We'll say no more about it," replied Davis. By-and-by. "Captain Tom is coming." The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low, rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western avenue and a little townward of the British consulate.
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall.
Shrieks and lamentations, prayers and imprecations resounded, until the brutal guards, wearied by the incessant clamor, finally drove the frenzied people back and set out upon their homeward journey. The little ones sat cowering in the wagons, afraid to weep, scarcely daring to breathe. Taken from home when they most needed their parents' care and love, what would become of these poor waifs?
We cannot take Chinese methods of lessening the pressure of population, and we must at once decide on the wisest way of dealing with our waifs and strays; if we do not, then the chances are that they will deal unpleasantly with us. The locust, the lemming, the phylloxera, are all very insignificant creatures; but, when they act together in numbers, they can very soon devastate a district.
Multiply all this thought and feeling, all this labour and prayer a thousandfold; and imagine the work of a woman as tenderly attached to home and its peaceful ways as any one of her sisters in the three kingdoms, who has made some twenty-eight voyages across the Atlantic "all for love and nothing for reward;" has, by miracles of prayerful toil and self-denying kindness, rescued from a worse than Egyptian bondage over three thousand waifs and strays, borne them in her strong arms to the other side of the world, and planted them in a good land; meanwhile, in the intervals of travel, facing the perils and storms of the troubled sea of East London society at its very worst, and from a myriad wrecks of manhood and womanhood, snatching the stragglers not yet past all hope, and, in a holy enthusiasm of love, parting with not a little of her own life in order that those dead might live.
"The sun comes from a foreign country, and first leaves that land, and then leaves the sea, before it gets here." When a Gipsy is prowling for hens, or any other little waifs, and wishes to leave a broken trail, so that his tracks may not be identified, he will walk with the feet interlocked one being placed outside the other making what in America is very naturally termed a snake-trail.
The thought of his childhood companions, the little waifs like himself who came from the offscourings of the earth. They had loved him he knew. He recalled slowly, laboriously, little incidents from his early history. They were dim and uncertain, many of them, but little kindnesses stood out.
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