by means of which we appease our appetite. The food was put into his mouth, and his lower jaw scarcely moved for the purpose of mastication. The greater part was bolted, and this act of swallowing seemed to be the principal evidence of the existence of life in him. If he had a pain in any of his limbs, he could not indicate by any sign the seat of the pain; a simple howling only made known that something ailed him. He seemed, in fact, to be the most pitiable creature in the whole house; and, in comparison with him, the calf and the sheep appeared to be high-placed, intellectual beings.

A particular diary is kept about every patient; also concerning his work, for which a small sum is allowed him, that the insane, seeing the profit accruing to them from labour, may be instigated to greater industry. Most of the men employ themselves with pasteboard work, a trade which is easily learned, and the products of which, as they speedily lead to some results, are not long in affording pleasure and profit.

Of the 130 patients in the house, in 1835, fifty were dismissed, half of them cured, and the other half, as incurable, delivered up to their friends, at the desire of the latter; and 24 died in the course of the year. All the vacancies thus occasioned were soon filled up in 1836. We saw the burial-place of the lunatics, a division of the great Russian cemetery, where 300 of those turbulent heads already repose.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL.

Apartment of the Director

Statistical Particulars-Treatment and Education of the Foundlings-Nurses, Teachers, and Medical Establishment - Lying-in Department - Reception Room - Baptism— Ward for Infants at the Breast-Cemetery-Dinner of Eight Hundred Girls.

Like the superintendents of most of the charitable institutions in Russia, the director of the Petersburg Foundling Hospital is a German from the Baltic provinces. He had promised to show me his remarkable establishment. I found him in his cheerful room engaged with some accounts. He was writing near an open window, through which the spring sun peeped with smiling face. As his business admitted of no delay, he requested me to take a seat for a few minutes on the sofa. Evergreen ivy and blossoming plants surrounded the writing table; tame birds were hopping about on the chairs and the window-sill, and seemed so well satisfied with their comfortable prison as not to avail themselves of the offered opportunity for escaping. A ruddy, blooming youth of eighteen, probably the son or nephew of the director, compressed into the handsome uniform of cornet of the guard, like a tulip in its coloured calix, was seated on an ottoman at the other end of the room, puffing at his ease clouds of smoke from a splendidly decorated Turkish

pipe, now and then clanking his spurs, and stroking his nascent beard.

In the business apartment of a man through whose hands from 600 to 700 million rubles pass every yearsuch is the sum annually placed to the account of the Foundling Hospital of Petersburg-and to whose management is entrusted the temporal well-being of from 25,000 to 30,000 souls, of a director of a poor-house with the sphere of action of a prince, everything acquires a higher degree of importance; and from the spirit which manifests itself in that which immediately surrounds him, one may easily infer the spirit which he infuses into his whole institution. My eyes, therefore, wandered with complacency from the busy director, so punctual in his duty, to his little vassals, the birds, to his flowers, and to the youth, his son or relative, who, in the cheerful sunshine of his own countenance, on the best terms with himself and with the world, was sipping coffee to his morning pipe.

At length the director laid down his pen. "Now," said he, kindly, "I am at your service; ask me what questions you please, and then I will take you to see whatever you like." Walking up and down his room, he then gave me an account of the object and foundation of the institution and of its revenues and present state.

As the Russians have not given their lunatic hospitals the name of mad-houses, so they have invented a milder designation for their foundling hospitals, which they term Wospitatelnoi Dom, or houses of education, as the education of the children found or brought thither is the main object of the whole institution. This name is of itself a benefit to the thousands who yearly leave it to pursue useful occupations in the world. take a governess from the House of Education, and the

No one will scruple to

children have no occasion to blush at having sprung from the Foundling Hospital.

The Petersburg Wospitatelnoi Dom is younger than that of Moscow, and was founded as a branch of the latter in 1770. Its sphere at first was extremely limited, and even in 1790 there were in it no more than 300 children; but since the beginning of the present century their number has increased with prodigious rapidity from 1000 to 10, 20, and 25 thousand. In 1837 there were no fewer than 25,600 young creatures under the protection of this gigantic establishment. Of late years the number of infants brought to it has continued gradually increasing. In 1828 and 1829, it was from 3,000 to 4,000; from 1830 to 1833, between 4,000 and 5,000; and, from 1835 to 1837, from 5,000 to 7,000.

The reception of the children is subject to no limitations: every little creature brought to the hospital is admitted without ceremony, and the government, so far from imposing any restraints, has invariably provided with extraordinary liberality for the prodigiously increasing wants of the institution. The original fund assigned by Catherine was extremely insignificant in comparison with the present property of the hospital: it was increased by the munificent donations of private persons, and further augmented by the still larger gifts of Paul, Alexander, and Nicholas; and now the institution is one of the richest estate-owners in Russia, and has dozens of millions invested in houses. That a profit derived from frivolity might be applied to a grave purpose, Alexander conferred on it the revenues arising from the manufacture of playing cards; and to this he added the Lombard, an institution of colossal magnitude, owing to the frequent ebb and flood in all the private coffers in Petersburg. Hence it is that, as we remarked above, 600 or 700 million rubles are an

nually carried to the account of the Foundling Hospital, and pass through the hands of its director, that is to say, nearly twice the amount of the total revenue of the Prussian monarchy. The maintenance of the whole institution now costs 5,200,000 rubles a year, which is about as much as the entire expenditure of three German kings. In 1837 buildings belonging to the hospital, to the amount of two million rubles, were erecting, and a handsome church for the foundlings, which cost 300,000 rubles, was just finished.

The principal establishments of the whole institution are in Petersburg and at Gatschina; but its operation extends over all the surrounding country. In Petersburg is the main building for the reception of infants of both sexes. Here they are kept for six weeks, and at the end of that time, if they can bear the journey, they are put out to nurse with peasants or townspeople for 130 wersts round the city. Here they remain till they are six years old. At six, the girls come back to Petersburg to be educated, and the boys are sent for the same purpose to Gatschina. The buildings of the establishment in Petersburg are not those of ordinary schools or hospitals: for magnitude, spaciousness, and splendour of arrangement, they are real palaces. They now cover, with their subordinate buildings, courts, and gardens, in the best part of the city, on the Fontanka, a space of 30,000 square fathom. The main buildings were formerly the residences of the princes Bobrinsky and the counts Rasumowsky, which were altered and adapted to the objects of the institution, and which, with many subsequent additions, now form of themselves a small division of the city.

The Petersburg Wospitatelnoi Dom-I like the Russian designation, strange as it may sound, better than our own-far surpasses that of Moscow in its arrangements;