not arise in the Night School. The Jewish children are supposed to be taught nothing of Christ until they are thirteen, by which time they are considered competent to decide upon their own religion. But, as I have said, the parents of these children, though they may attend the synagogue and keep holy the Sabbath, are distinctly lax, and they have raised no objection to the sweet and simple statement on the wall. I found myself wondering what it might convey to these little souls who, according to their own tradition, had so recently been fetched by an angel from the Jewish treasury, where since the creation of the world they had lain awaiting their incarnation. The preternatural wisdom of some of the faces seemed to make the tradition comprehensible. There were five rows of children, the majority girls, but at the back there was one form full of boys-shy, self-conscious, snuffling little boys, amongst whom there was a constant circulation of one grimy pocket-handkerchief. They were all nicely dressed, boys and girls alike, even to the very poorest; most of them in close woollen caps and knitted jerseys, and they had more colour in their clothes than is usual with London children.

Matty, with her peculiar grin of good fellowship, dragged a wooden stool close to my side, and hugging Florence' tightly in her arms, settled herself down as a mere spectator. For once her face shone with cleanliness and her hair had been carefully combed so that the curls stood out in a perfect bush round her head. Her pinafore and Florence's robe, however, had alike escaped the wash-tub, and were a good match to the boys' handkerchief. She deliberately spelt over the text to herself, repeating the last word with quite unnecessary emphasis. Sinners. A very devil-may-care twinkle leapt to her eyes as they swept the rows of Jewish children in front of her, and it is to be feared she did not apply the word personally. Florence shan't 'ave no gawdmother,' she murmured triumphantly; she knew now how right she had been. Fortunately, Yenci was absorbed in marshalling her forces in the front row, and did not heed the challenge. The proceedings opened with the Lord's Prayer, that ancient Jewish form of supplication, from which the clause introduced by Him Who came to save sinners was not on this occasion omitted: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.'

It is a consoling reflection that, whatever the condition of distress in Spitalfields, the Jewish children, owing to the good management of their mothers, are usually well enough fed to be in high spirits, and the curate who delivered a most careful address to them on the amount of money spent on drink in England found his hands full this evening. The intelligent and vociferous interest which these children displayed. in statistics was overwhelming; but our gratification received something of a shock presently, when, in response to a question as to why they should be happy to belong to a Band of Hope, a forest of small hands was waved, followed by an almost unanimous shout of Because

it costs less money, sir.' The curate, dismayed by so Israelitish an argument, changed the conversation by asking the little girls if they knew why they sat in front and always came before the boys. Here was Matty's opportunity. She was a little tired of her superior position as an outsider to this company of sinners,' and in the question of drink and money she was wholly uninterested; but here was something that she knew about, and her skinny arm shot up unhesitatingly. 'We's bigger,' cried the shrill voice of the imp, 'we'se better, and we'se more important.' The dissentient murmur from the back bench was calmed by the curate's explanation that boys have to earn money. 'Garn,' retorted the shrill little voice at my elbow, while Yenci in the front row politely explained that girls also were sometimes expected to contribute to the family purse. The curate retired after this, and the serious business of the evening, from the children's point of view, began. Two mites in blue pinafores ascended the platform and sang a hoarse little duet about cooking and baking with admirable dramatic action. Jewish children are not shy, and there was much competition during the evening for the part of performer. Matty continued to sit apart and apparently entranced. Yenci, as mistress of the ceremonies, was in her element. She had a good memory, and chose her subordinates well, and the lady who had previously coached them had the wisdom to leave her full control for the evening, while she devoted her own energies to the piano.

The contrast between the two children struck me that evening as significant. The one was a born leader, a veritable Napoleon amongst her fellows, competent, well ordered, recognising herself as a small but not unimportant member of a chosen if persecuted people. Matty, on the other hand, was above all things an individualist, an adventuress, ready to fight for her own hand or, still better, her own amusement, but incapable of submitting to discipline or of identifying herself with her fellows. Looking at the two together, it seemed to me possible to understand the steady growth and consolidation of the Jewish Colony in East London, and the lack of resistance in the shifting Gentile population of Spitalfields.

Yenci and three younger girls had just finished waving immense Union Jacks above their heads and singing a patriotic song about the 'Red, White, and Blue,' which lost something of its point from the fact that they were none of them of British extraction, when Matty suddenly leapt to her feet. Still clutching 'Florence,' she made her way up to the platform. Please, teacher, may I sing?' The lady knew little or nothing of Matty's capacities, and the programme should by now have been finished; but it was impossible for anyone who was human to resist the little flushed eager face and the sparkling eyes. So Matty climbed on to the platform, and with great aplomb she sang a little song aboutDirty Tommy 'unaccompanied, since nobody had ever heard it before. It was a

funny crooning, rather unintelligible little song, and seemed to have some connection with her own grubby pinafore.

But presently the lady at the piano struck some chords, and Matty, kicking off her shoes, began to dance. Surely she had never danced, in Spitalfields at all events, as she danced that night. This minute atom of humanity became the embodiment of life and movement, in complete abandonment apparently to a sensation of pure joie de vivre. It was not merely the naturally joyous dance of childhood; the steps were intricate, and presently, tossing her doll to Yenci in the front row, she tore off her pinafore, and holding it above her head as a scarf, she danced with all the grace and finish of a professional. The little boys giggled—but that is only a way boys have of pretending that they are not impressed-and the girls sat spellbound. Watching her, I could feel no doubt in my mind that the child had been very carefully trained in that mysterious past out of which she came, and of which she could or would tell us nothing.

Quite suddenly she stopped, leaped lightly off the platform, and running to Yenci, who was too astonished to move, she snatched 'Florence' from her. I likes yer, Yenci,' she exclaimed breathlessly; 'but you know yer a sinner, and Florence can't have no gawdmother'; and with that parting shot, and without another word to any of us, she was gone like a flash into the night.

For a few moments we were all paralysed by the suddenness of her movements, and it was with a conscious effort that we rose to our feet to conclude the evening with the National Anthem and a hymn of suitable selection. The Jewish children, from whom Matty might with advantage have learned good manners, said good-night very prettily to the ladies, and then a little deputation, headed by Yenci, came to invite me to attend a much grander entertainment to be given by them in a big hall the following week, and for which this had been in some sense a rehearsal. Influenced largely, I must admit, by the hope of seeing Matty dance again, I accepted. She will be there, won't she?' I inquired of one of the ladies afterwards. The lady smiled enigmatically, and shrugged her shoulders. 'No one knows,' she said; but I'll try to catch her. Poor little girl,' she added rather sadly, I doubt if we are doing her much good.'

‘But Mr. B——' (naming the doll-parson) 'has some scheme for her, has he not?' I inquired hopefully. The lady smiled again, this time with evident amusement. 'I believe so,' she replied briefly. 'We have all had schemes for Matty.'

And next week I was doomed to disappointment. The morning after the entertainment at the night school Matty and her mother had disappeared, bag and baggage, and no trace of them has yet been found. It is, of course, a way they have in Spitalfields, but those of us who had known the little girl, even those to whom she had been

most troublesome, feel a chill sense of loss and depression. The dollparson' is furious, but he knows now that he was justified in his deep distrust of Mrs. Power. That woman has stolen a march upon us, and has gone to turn the child's talent to account-somewhere,' he declares; but I shall find her.'

Will he? I wonder. He is of course an optimist, or he could not have worked for ten years in the East-end, and yet refuse to be discouraged. It seems to me that Matty literally danced out of our lives as she did out of the Night School that cold February evening-danced away from order and discipline and all those limitations of which she had such an instinctive terror. Just as there are nymphs of the wood and stream who occasionally lose their way amongst us mortals, so perhaps there may be spirits of the pavement, mischievous elfin creatures who cannot be fitted into the scheme of our later civilisation. As such I shall always think of Matty, but meantime the harsher realities of life cannot be ignored, and her friends are searching diligently. The doll-parson' has an immovable conviction that we shall find her next winter upon the boards of the pantomime. It is possible, and it is even more possible that some day we may flock to see a dancer of European reputation; but she will no longer be Matty of Spitalfields.

ROSE M. BRADLEY.

A BELGIAN POET OF YESTERDAY

CHARLES VAN LERBerghe

WHEN the star of a new poet presents itself to the vision of mankind, it comes, like new stars of another kind, but slowly into general acceptance. Those who interest themselves in its appearance are at first but few; and skilled though they may be by long training to estimate its gravity, brilliancy, and probable duration, they are, as a rule, shy in committing themselves to any definite prediction as to its exact magnitude or importance. Now and then some more daring literary astronomer has the courage to leave the beaten track and, confiding in his own judgment and careless of what the world at large may say, calls aloud from the housetops to a possibly incredulous audience that he has seen such a star, and that any who concern themselves with such celestial apparitions may see what he has seen if only they will take the trouble to turn their eyes in the direction to which he points.

1

Such is the course which M. Maurice Maeterlinck has taken in drawing attention to Charles von Lerberghe, a Belgian poet of yesterday, whose name was all but unknown out of his own country until the sympathies of so distinguished an authority in literature were enlisted in his cause, and one who, even since then, must, so far as Great Britain generally is concerned, be ranked amongst the unappreciated and unread. Yet in Lerberghe we have a writer of poems of a kind unknown before his day in any European tongue. He should need no herald: a lover of true poetry has but to stumble by some chance upon his work to find that he has walked into a land like that portrayed in a few telling words by our late Laureate,

Where no man comes,

Or hath come since the making of the world

a land of fresh and romantic poetry into which humanity, as we understand it, has as yet made no rude entrance-a land where Eve, the one really human thing that meets our gaze, is human only in her vast and inseparable sympathy with all that is around her; with the breath of flowers that bloom and die as mortals will; with the moving shadows that steal from rock and tree when the sun is going 1 Vers et Prose, December 1905.