A SHADOW 247 
promptly, “Yes.” The others will hesitate, 
will bid you wait till they are nearer, till they 
can personally inspect the little thing and take 
an inventory of its traits ; it may be dirty, too; 
it may be diseased. Ah! but this is not to love 
children, and you might as well bea man. To 
love children is to love childhood, instinctively, 
at whatever distance, the first impulse being 
one of attraction, though it may be checked by 
later discoveries. Unless your heart com- 
mands at least as long a range as your eye, it is 
not worth much. The dearest saint in my cal- 
endar never entered a railway car that she did 
not look round for a baby, which, when discov- 
ered, must always be won at once into her arms. 
If it was dirty, she would have been glad to 
bathe it; if ill, to heal it. It would not have 
seemed to her anything worthy the name of 
love, to seek only those who were wholesome 
and clean. Like the young girl in Holmes’s 
most touching poem, she would have claimed 
as her own the outcast child whom nurses and 
physicians had abandoned. 
“¢Take her, dread Angel! Break in love 
This bruised reed and make it thine!’ 
No voice descended from above, 
But Avis answered, ‘ She is mine!’” 
When I think of the self-devotion which the 
human heart can contain—of those saintly 
