an old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little
feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and
his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little
bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for
several years, look in steadily at us. There he lay in his little
frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body
from which he was slowly parting – there he lay, quite quiet, quite
patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he
seldom complained; “he lay there, seemin’ to woonder what it was a’
aboot.” God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had
his reasons for wondering – reasons for wondering how it could
possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full
of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the
birds that never got near him – reasons for wondering how he came
to be left there, a little decrepid old man pining to death, quite
a thing of course, as if there were no crowds of healthy and happy
children playing on the grass under the summer’s sun within a
stone’s throw of him, as if there were no bright, moving sea on the
other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were
no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and
movement, and vigour anywhere in the world – nothing but stoppage
and decay. There he lay looking at us, saying, in his silence,
more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any
orator in my life, “Will you please to tell me what this means,
strange man? and if you can give me any good reason why I should be
so soon, so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children
were to come into His presence and were not to be forbidden, but
who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard
road by which I am travelling; pray give that reason to me, for I
seek it very earnestly and wonder about it very much;” and to my
mind he has been wondering about it ever since. Many a poor child,
sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in this London;
many a poor sick child I have seen most affectionately and kindly
tended by poor people, in an unwholesome house and under untoward
circumstances, wherein its recovery was quite impossible; but at
all such times I have seen my poor little drooping friend in his
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb speech to me, and I
have always found him wondering what it meant, and why, in the name
of a gracious God, such things should be!
Now, ladies and gentlemen, such things need not be, and will not
be, if this company, which is a drop of the life-blood of the great
compassionate public heart, will only accept the means of rescue
and prevention which it is mine to offer. Within a quarter of a
mile of this place where I speak, stands a courtly old house, where
once, no doubt, blooming children were born, and grew up to be men
and women, and married, and brought their own blooming children
back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the other
day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces.
In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family
bedchambers of that house are now converted are such little
patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses,
and the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre.
Grouped about the little low tables in the centre of the rooms are
such tiny convalescents that they seem to be playing at having been
ill. On the doll’s beds are such diminutive creatures that each
poor sufferer is supplied with its tray of toys; and, looking
round, you may see how the little tired, flushed cheek has toppled