06 Chapter 6. Toy Makers.

Chapter 6.

Toy Makers.

If we want to see the toy makers really "at home," we shall have to say good-bye to the working-girls of East London and pay a visit to one of the quaint old towns of Germany.

We should find numbers of children, some of them not more than five or six years of age, very busy making toys, not to play with, but to sell, for quite a number of the toys we see in the windows of the toy-shops are made by the children of Holland and Germany, who do not seem to think it at all hard to have to begin early to help their parents by working. But we cannot take such a long journey to-day, and yet I shall, I think, be able to shew you a few of the child toy makers, for a great many Germans live in the East of London, and some of them work at their old trade in the land of their adoption. Who will go with me to a poor but quiet street in Shoreditch?

Lizzie and Florence are quite ready for a walk, but before we reach the house we are going to Lizzie has noticed that though the houses are small, many of the windows are large and flat, and wants to know why they are all of one shape?

Ah Lizzie, the windows you are looking at always interest me greatly, for the very old houses in which we still see them were built many years ago; in them French silk weavers set up their looms and worked at their own trade, weaving rich silks and soft velvets, costing I should be afraid to say how many shillings a yard.

Nearly all these weavers, or their fathers, had made a noble choice to suffer for Christ’s sake rather than deny His name, to leave their pleasant homes and pretty gardens in France rather than give up their Bibles. But what is Florrie saying? That she has heard of these weavers, who were sometimes called Huguenots, but thought they lived at Spitalfields.

Florrie is right, by far the largest number really settled there; but we are only a short walk from Spitalfields, and so many of the houses in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green are built with the windows Lizzie noticed, and which are, I believe, called "side lights," and we may be sure that many of them lived and worked in this neighbourhood. But if we talk any more about the weavers we shall not have time for our visit to the doll makers.

How busy they all are — father, mother and four children. What are they making? Wooden dolls. Can they get enough work to keep them employed all the year round?

"Oh, no," the father, who speaks English very well, says. There is not much doing in the doll line, for it is really cheaper to get toys from Germany than to have them made in England; but now and then, when they are wanted in a hurry, he gets an order for a few dozen, and then the whole family work till they are ready to be sent to the warehouse.

He is cutting out dolls from pieces of wood, while the eldest son rounds off all the arms on a small turning lathe. When ready they are passed on to a girl, who fastens arms and legs on to the bodies. The mother paints the faces. Two younger children are busy "helping mother," and we think of the old proverb "Many hands make light work."

It is cheering to find that this industrious family have a Bible in their own language, a Bible that is greatly valued and often read. The father sometimes tells his children stories of Germany, "the Fatherland," as he loves to call it. One they like very much begins something like this:"Through an old town in Germany, Four hundred years ago,A little boy, barefooted,Went singing through the snow." And goes on to tell how Martin Luther, of whom we have all heard and read so much, was, when a boy, so poor that while attending school and working hard at his lessons, was often obliged to go, with a few other schoolboys as needy as himself, into the streets and sing, hoping to receive a little food or a few small coins. But God was leading him on step by step to the great work of his life. A time came when, after having long felt the burden of sin and tried in many ways to save himself, he was at last enabled to turn away from his own doings and trust only in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. Then, but not till then, he was free to tell others of the Saviour who had sought and found him.

Perhaps another time I may tell you how graciously the Lord helped him to place numbers of gospel books and tracts in the hands of thousands of German readers.