tioning it; and because, madam, if you are not yet a mother, it is possible that you may one day be so. I would not have you as ignorant as a certain mother, whose doings I should disbelieve were they not beyond all doubt.

'Pray what did she do?'

'Little enough. Nothing. But as you ought to know the consequences of doing nothing, oblige me with your attention for a couple of minutes. In the first place, you can make any child scrofulous by a due course of improper treatment. A scrofulous person has been described as a house built of bad materials from top to bottom. It was so in this case. The lady (not of the United Kingdom) held that "when you are rich you are independent." Her independence led her to bring up her children as follows, and to make them perfectly scrofulous. Not being able, or not choosing, to suckle them herself, she gave them from their birth the suck-bottle, an instrument sure to kill delicate children. Disdaining to trouble herself about them, she confided them to a couple of young nursemaids, whose only care was to prevent their squalling; which object they attained by gorging them with pap and questionable milk. To keep them quiet, at three years old they still gave them big suckbottles full of sugar and water, with which to amuse themselves by day and by night. The poor little weaklings felt none of the benign influence of the master's or the mistress's

eye. Consequently, beneath their expensive finery they were always filthy and full of vermin. At three and a half they were sent to school, to get them out of the way. At six or seven half her children, born healthy, had enormous sores at and round their necks. Her independence had given them scrofula, a disease from which both she and her husband were exempt, and which had never been known to occur in their families.'

'What a wicked creature!'

'Call her rather ignorant and thoughtless. Probably she would not have done so had somebody taken the trouble to tell her what I

am now venturing to tell you. I have said that half her children became afflicted; but the other half, although without any decided strumous manifestation, nevertheless presented the type-big-headed, pigeon-breasted, and the rest of it.' It might have been that which made them ill.'

'No, no. The aspect presented by scrofulous persons is the effect and not the cause of the disease. It is even observable during the period which may be called its incubation. Everything, with them, is out of proportion. Too short or too tall, too stout or too thin, they seem deficient in that innate force which in other people regulates the course of their growth and moulds every member into proportion and harmony with the rest of their body. The form of their skull is generally singular; the back part largely developed, the forehead low, the neck short, the jaws heavy and protruding, the lips thick. Their features offer striking contrasts. Sometimes the eye is bright and brilliant, sometimes dull and deathlike; one has a rosy and transparent complexion, another's is pale and earthy in hue; some have a luxuriant head of hair, while a greater number are almost bald. Their irregularity of stature is instanced by Albert, who gives in his lectures the case of a lad who remained quite short and little up to the age of fourteen, when he suddenly shot up to six feet four!'

'Extraordinary!'

'Still more extraordinary that, for these strange symptoms and affections, the sea, the blessed sea, should be the remedy, which brings me to the pith of my story. If the rich often suffer from this heavy affliction, what must be the case with the poor? You, my dear madam, if circumstances require it, can take your ailing young folks to the sea; the town-pent artisan cannot. And here the work of benevolence steps in.'

In a paper headed 'Sands of Life,' in All the Year Round,' vol. v., first series, we find mention of a good physician, Doctor Paul Perrochaud, then of Montreuil-sur-Mer, France. The paper says: 'Every

body has his hobby; Dr. Perrochaud's hobby is SCROFULOUS CHILDREN. And why not? A scrofulous child is far more interesting than a healthy child; in fact, a healthy child is uninteresting. It never gives you the excitement of fearing that it should go blind, or should melt away to nothing, or become frightful to behold with abscesses and scars, or be a cripple for life with white swellings and stiff joints, if consumption do not shorten its sufferings. With a healthy child you have no need to sit up o' nights, watching whether the flame of life is to go out speedily or to flicker on a little longer. A healthy child never gives you the pleasure of observing the results of successful treatment-the look that assures a fresh hold on existence, the increasing flesh, the clearer complexion, the smile.

'But if the scrofulous child bə also a poor child-the child of parents confined within large cities, or a foundling child in a foundling hospital, fatherless and motherless -our interest in the child increases tenfold. It is a romance in one volume, whose tedious chapters we cannot skip and turn to the end to satisfy our curiosity. Actual life, if we wish to study it, insists on our being unflinching readers; we must follow every individual page before we can arrive at the conclusion. How strong the interest, is proved by the way in which the appetite grows with the indulgence. Dr. Perrochaud began with nursing one scrofulous child; he now has one hundred under his wing: he hopes in a year or two to get some four or five hundred together.'

He has them; but we must not go on too fast. An oak is a fine tree to look at and to have; but it started in life as a simple acorn. The palatial Hôpital Napoléon, which now graces the beach of Berck-sur-Mer, had for its acorn and its origin something much resembling a fisherman's hut. Dr. Perrochaud's seaside treatment of his own private patients began in 1854; but in 1856, two years afterwards, some rickety foundlings were sent to Berck from Paris by the

Assistance Publique, and MM. Frère and Perrochaud undertook to visit them three times a week. In 1858 they had nothing but cures to register-not a single death-and heaven knows what children they were, puny, weakly, exhausted, all but dying.

Here please excuse a short parenthesis. My readers who do know will pardon my informing those who do not, that the Assistance Publique of Paris is a charitable institution, so wealthy and influential that it Inay almost be called a power, which relieves the poor of the metropolis, maintains hospitals, besides accomplishing other good works. Its resources may be guessed at from one item of income-the tenth part of the gross receipts (not the profits) of all the theatres in Paris every night.

The Assistance Publique, then, sent this hopeless lot of poor infants, to be taken in charge by a widow at Berck, to try if the sea could save their lives; and it did. It is a pity, for the sake of my story, that it was not always the same benevolent widow who fulfilled the task; but the first widow, already advanced in years, could not long continue her work. So they were, I may almost say, adopted by another widow, who would do anything for them, except hear them cry; they had only to whine a little and pipe their eye, to get her to permit or to give them whatever their whimsies pleased to exact. And please, reader, if you are a father or mother, isn't spoiling sick children a necessary, and often an effectual part of their medical treatment? At any rate, we all know the results of the opposite mode of treatment - unkindness. Widow Brillard (I like better to call her Marianne) spoiled and cured them so well, that in 1859 the Assistance Publique sent her thirty sick babes, and three Sisters of Charity to help her. The sanatory acorn had taken root and was beginning to put forth promising shoots; it was already something more than a sapling. The Assistance Publique soon built on the *See 'On the French Stage,' at P. 433 of the May No, of London Society."

shore a wooden hospital containing a hundred beds, which received its little patients in July, 1861. Marianne had then to relinquish her charge she very unwillingly gave up the delights of being worried all day by one fretful child or another, and having her rest broken half-adozen times every night. It is this wooden hospital for poor scrofulous children which was described in the first series of All the Year Round.'

The subject might furnish a nursery rhyme. Suppose we try

one:-

'There was an old woman, she dwelt by the sea,

And a very good little old woman was she. [She took boys and girls that were sick, for her pleasure,

And told them to search on the beach for a treasure;

If they hadn't the strength so far to repair, Her wheelbarrow merrily trundled them

there.

They paddled, and puddled, and frolicked;

and then

Her wheelbarrow trundled them all back again.

"And as to the treasure, my dears," she

would say,

"Twill be found, sure, to-morrow, if not found to-day.

The treasure of treasures, the wealthiest of wealth,!

The jewel of jewels, my darlings, is Health." So she gave them good broth with plenty of bread,

She wiped all their noses and put them to bed.'

The wooden hospital, already a tree, bore such satisfactory fruits, that M. Husson, the director of the Assistance Publique, determined to build close by it (not suppressing it) a magnificent hospital of brick and stone, capable of receiving at least five hundred patients, which now is a thing to see. All this took time to effect; but at present it is in admirable working order, with every comfort and every luxury likely to contribute to a cure that wealth and fondness can supply; for the children experience something quite different to charitable treatment. The spoiling system, begun by poor old Marianne, and continued in the wooden hospital, is persisted in in the stately establishment at Berck-sur-Mer, which has received the name of the 'Hôpital Napoléon.'

And don't they look happy, those rescued children! 'But where are the malades?' I asked, on stepping into the great-boys' school-room. These are the malades; of course they are getting better fast.' They learn lessons out of pride, rather than through compulsion. Those about to do their first communion (analogous to our confirmation) would be ashamed not to know their catechism. The little ones do much as they like. The hospital is stamped with luxury, beginning with the central church, over whose altar is written the appropriate text, 'Let little children come unto me.' What else but luxury are the patterned pavement, the stained glass windows, the comfortable benches with backs corresponding to the stature of the sitters? Is it not luxury for poor sick children to be able to go from one part of the building to another in glazed corridors decorated with pot plants; to have toys, and Christmas trees, and magic-lantern shows in due season; to bathe in winter in a pool of warm seawater, in a conservatory garnished with flowers; to have primeurs, early fruits and vegetables, regularly sent from Paris, meat on fast-days, and fish (for the sake of the phosphates and oil it contains) when not commanded by the discipline of their church? Their abstinence consists of four meals a day; and, instead of thin potations, the little topers quaff generous Abbeville beer. This is the way in which the hospital combats the disastrous effects of insufficient alimentation, which may have been, and often is, one of the causes of the patient's illness.

Berck has a beach composed entirely of sand, whereon you may take a twelve miles' walk, whatever be the state of the tide. No fresh-water streams deposit their mud there. It is naked as far as trees are concerned; but it is sheltered from north and east winds, and not a ray of sunshine is lost. At every tide the sea retires for nearly a mile, and on returning covers the sands with a sheet of limpid water in which you can bathe without the slightest danger, and in which the children can indulge in the romps and duck

ings which are an essential part of their seaside treatment.

One peculiarity, and also advantage, consists in a number of little hollows or pools, which the peasants call bâches, left by the tide. They remain in the same spots, except occasionally when the grand tides of the equinoxes, aided by high winds, change their places. The main point is that baches always exist. As they remain uncovered by the sea for four or five hours between every tide, and are always quite shallow, the water in them, exposed to the sun, rapidly attains a temperature of from 70° to 80° Fahrenheit. They are just the places for children to dabble in, and fish for shrimps and crabs up to their waists in water; and the smarter their clothes, the more they would enjoy spoiling them. I need hardly tell you that the more boys and girls are told not to wet themselves in puddles, the more they persist in doing it. The sanatory advantages derived from this perverse instinct are great. New-come children, as well as those who are too young or too delicate to be allowed to bathe in the open sea, play in the bâches without inconvenience, become rapidly acclimatised, and experience a change in their health for the better, under the combined influence of sea air and sea water. In early spring and in autumn, when the sea is too cold to allow of their bathing, the children are taken every day to play in the bâches. Dr. Perrochaud has proved the efficacy of this practice by more than seven hundred observations.

In fact, except during the time allotted to meals and sleep, the children are always on the beach, weather permitting, improvising gymnastic feats, and scrambling about the dunes, where they play at taking hip-baths in the warm dry sand. Constantly exposed to the effects of sunshine and sea air, their occupation is, to sleep well all night, and to work hard all day at doing nothing. Nude-footed during summer and lightly clad, these children, so delicate at their arrival, often affected with bronchites which resist the most careful treatment,

soon get rid of them, and brave the changes of the weather without taking the slightest cold. Add to this, baths twice a day-but very short baths, from three to five minutes at most-half a tumbler of sea water morning and night, a wholesome and nutritious diet, and you have the whole course of treatment followed at Berck.

This treatment is the same for all, except for the new arrivals, who do not bathe in the sea until they are well acclimatised to the shore. In winter, they lead the same sort of life. The children are clad a little more warmly and do not bathe in the sea, and that is all. For some, nevertheless, the cold bath, which they cannot take, is replaced by baths of warm sea water. Often, when a child has taken baths during six weeks or two months, they are interrupted for a fortnight, and then recommenced afresh.

At the beginning of autumn Dr. Perrochaud gives them all cod-liver oil in liberal doses, not as a medicine, but simply to supply them with an aliment rich in carbon, which, transformed into animal heat by respiration, enables them to resist the cold. They are, in fact, too puny and weak to furnish of themselves the materials for a sufficiently active respiration; and the injurious effects of cold on the scrofulous are incontestable. True, they might be kept shut up in wellwarmed rooms; but in that case, what would be the use of bringing them to the seaside? They must be able to live in the open air at all times; and the means employed by Dr. Perrochaud are certainly the best that can be suggested. The further you advance into the Arctic regions, the more you will find the food of the inhabitants to consist of oil, fish, and fatty matters. The Laplanders, the Esquimaux, and the Greenlanders, live exclusively on animal food and fish oil, of which latter they consume enormous quantities. This diet, at which our strongest stomachs would revolt, enables them to resist extraordinarily low temperatures.

The physiological explanation of the fact is simple. Animal heat is

in direct proportion to the carbonic acid given out by expiration; in other words, to the quantity of carbon burnt within us. This carbon is introduced by our food, and codliver oil contains a large supply. No alimentary substance can exclusively replace fatty articles of diet. The oil, therefore, thus administered, allows the children to take open-air exercise in all weathers; and exercise is indispensable in order that the oil be utilised. We thus find ourselves moving in a circle, of which there are many in pathology; the effect becomes the cause, and vice versa. The results are what M. Perrochaud expected. So well do the children resist the winter's cold, that, when they can do it without being observed, they will pull off their shoes and stockings, in order to run about barefoot on the frozen sand.

The results obtained are as rapid as brilliant. In five or six weeks, the children who arrived in a pitiable state of weakness recover fresh vitality. Instead of being dull and indifferent, remaining without budging wherever they are put, they become brisk and lively, and beg to be allowed to play with the others. This transformation - almost this resurrection-is so manifest, that when the Empress visited the hospital in 1864, she wished to put the matter to the test. The children were brought to her altogether. Her Majesty, without making a single mistake, picked out those who had only just arrived at the seaside from those who had enjoyed a longer residence there.

Finally, the object of this paper is threefold: First, to induce even a greater liking than actually exists for seaside holidays, by giving reasons why we ought to indulge that liking. Secondly, to point out to benevolent persons a model seaside sanatorium, which, though specially intended to aid the most helpless members of a civilised community (namely, the sick children of working people, especially

those residing in towns), can easily be adapted to the requirements of adults, whether male or female. Thirdly, to indicate to sufferers and their friends a spot where they will find every requisite for their successful treatment-pure sea air, baths, quiet, creature comforts, and firstrate medical advice, if needed. No doubt all those advantages are to be obtained at home; we should be unfortunate indeed were we obliged to go abroad to seek them: which does not prevent my speaking, in terms of merited eulogy, of what Berck-sur-Mer has been made, with its magnificent Hôpital Napoléon, by the untiring zeal of Dr. Paul Perrochaud.

Persons desirous of further information, whether official or professional, will do well to consult the following works:

'Rapport sur les résultats obtenus dans le traitement des Enfants Scrofuleux à l'Hôpital de Berck-surMer (Pas-de-Calais). Par M. le Docteur Bergeron." Paris, Paul Dupont, Imprimeur de l'Administration de l'Assistance Publique, Rue de Grenelle Saint Honoré, 45. 1866.

'Hôpital Napoléon, Fondé sur la Plage de Berck (Pas-de-Calais), pour le traitement des Enfants Scrofuleux. Règlement du Service Intérieur.' Paris, Paul Dupont, 41, Rue J. J. Rousseau (Hôtel des Fermes). 1869.

'De l'influence du Séjour à Berck (Pas-de-Calais) dans le traitement des Scrofules. Par Gaston Houzel, Docteur en Medecine.' Paris, Ancienne Maison Gustave Retaux, C. Pichon-Lamy Successeur, LibraireEditeur, 15, Rue Cujas (Ancienne Rue des Grès). 1868.

Notice sur l'Hôpital Napoléon, Fondé à Berck-sur-Mer (Pas-deCalais).' Paris, Imprimerie Administrative de Paul Dupont, 41, Rue J. J. Rousseau. 1869.

To the third of these especially the present writer is much indebted, with the assistance of his own personal observations.

E. S. D.