ORPHAN ISLAND CHAPTER I THE BEGINNING OF IT I MISS CHARLOTTE SMITH, a kind-hearted lady of thirty or so, set forth in the year 1855 to conduct some fifty orphans, of various nationalities and all of them under ten years of age, from East London to San Francisco, where an orphanage had been provided for them by a wealthy philanthropist, who was so right-minded as to desire to use in this manner some of the riches he had obtained in the Californian gold rush of six years before. They went in a large steamship, provided also by the philanthropist, much of it being fitted out as a crèche, with such arrangements for the entertainment, restraint, and otherwise rendering as peaceable and innocuous as might be, of infant orphans, as occurred to thoughtful and philanthropic minds in the middle years of the nineteenth century. There were a number of little walled pens for the more juvenile orphans, in which they sat and disported themselves with bricks, rattles, dolls, balls, wooden animals, and the other harmless objects suitable to their tender years; there were shelves stocked with books for the young which it was hoped that the elder |