LONELY ANGLO-INDIAN CHILDREN.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."1 SIR,—I think I speak for very many Anglo-Indian parents when I ask whether you, or any of your readers, can suggest a means whereby it would be possible for us to hear of, and get into touch with, kind, jolly, well-bred people living in the country (or in a town and possessing a large garden), who would be willing to take our often exceedingly lonely children during the holidays, and give them a happy time in return • for substantial remuneration? Advertisements bring in shoals of replies from " good Christian homes." That is not what we want. Some of us have had vicarious experience of them, and know what they mean. They may be Christian, but the first reason they take the children is to make money out of them, and very often they are homes where the harassed house-mother .has already far too much to do to see that her little paying guests have a happy holiday (or, worst of all, her little paying guest, for many of these little lonely ones are only.children).
What we pray God for nightly is that some home may turn
up which is well run and cheerful, belonging either to a not too elderly childless couple or to a mother whose heart and house are big enough, and whose purse is not too shallow, to allow her to give a little love and care to the lonely children of another woman, children whose continual cry is, " Mummy, will you be back next holidays? " All parents have not brothers, sisters, or relations or friends who are able or willing to take the children, and it is on behalf of those of us who are in that plight, whose babies of eight and nine have nowhere to go in the long, long holidays, and no house they can look to as a kind of home during the years the parents are in India or the holidays when the mother is with the father (Christmas and Easter usually), that I ask you to publish this letter, and that I send with it the deep and heartfelt prayer that some of your readers may answer.—With grateful acknowledgments for your kindness. I am, Sir, 8:c.,
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