There is a cradle within the door of one of the great institutions of New York before which a constant recurring tragedy is being enacted. It is a plain cradle, quite simply draped in white, but with such a look of cozy comfort about it that one would scarcely suspect it to be a cradle of sorrow. A little white bed, with a neatly turned-back coverlet, is made up within it. A long strip of white muslin, tied in a tasteful bow at the top, drapes its rounded sides. About it, but within the precincts of warmth and comfort of which it is a part, spreads a chamber of silence—a quiet, small, plainly furnished room, the appearance of which emphasizes the peculiarity of the cradle itself.
If the mind were not familiar with the details with which it is so startlingly associated, the question would naturally arise as to what it was doing there, why it should be standing there alone. No one seems to be watching it. It has not the slightest appearance of usefulness. And yet there it stands day after day, and year after year, a ready-prepared cradle, and no infant to live in it.
And yet this cradle is the most useful, and, in a way, the most inhabited cradle in the world. Day after day and year after year it is a recipient of more small wayfaring souls than any other cradle in the world. In it the real children of sorrow are placed, and over it more tears are shed than if it were an open grave.
242 It is a place where annually twelve hundred foundlings are placed, many of them by mothers who are too helpless or too unfortunately environed to be further able to care for their children; and the misery which compels it makes of the little open crib a cradle of tears.
The interest of this cradle is that it has been the silent witness of more truly heartbreaking scenes than any other cradle since the world began. For nearly sixty years it has stood where it does to-day, ready-draped, open, while almost as many thousand mothers have stolen shamefacedly in and after looking hopelessly about have laid their helpless offspring w............