"trifling" in which one may help a workhouse
inmate without transgressing the rules of the
establishment. It is forbidden, and rightly, to
take into the workhouse spirituous liquors or
articles of food which, in the case of the sick,
might undo all that the medical men are doing.
But the most rigid dietary hardly forbids to the
aged men and women, tea and snuff, and these seem
safe articles for occasional presents. At a
comparatively small outlay of time and money, a large
return of gratitude and friendly feeling is secured
with less of envy than might be expected. The
patients know very well that they cannot all be
noticed on every visit; indeed it would be a poor
compensation for the long confiding talk which
they now occasionally enjoy, if the visitor were
to walk from bed to bed and only say a few
words to each. Once assure them of your
interest in their individual cases, and they will
trust you, and greet you with a smile as you
pass their beds, even if you spend all your time
with another patient. As among ourselves, the
sight of a true friend, without one spoken word,
makes the heart leap for joy; so among the
workhouse poor, even a transient glance at you,
as you pass through the ward, is a comfort.
It affords a glimpse of the outer world,
in which their sympathies and affections are still
busy, but which many of them are destined
never to look upon again. Its cheerfulness
enters wiith the visitor; its fashions are seen in
his dress; its activity in his brisk and lively
step; its kindliness in the interest he shows for
them: an interest which they immediately distinguish
from the visits and services of official matrons
and assistants, however kind. The sympathies
of the poor are not "inside the workhouse:"
the heart of each patient is in the place he calls
his home—perhaps a single room in a dark,
dingy neighbourhood, where he may have left a
mother, or a wife and children, to earn their
living with difficulty. If any philanthropist
should wish to explore the depths of misery and
degradation, the blackest cellars, the foulest
abodes, the dingiest alleys, which are hidden
within the recesses of this vast metropolis, let
him, as the shortest mode of proceeding, make
acquaintance with some of the workhouse poor,
and get the addresses of their friends. Not
that these friends are necessarily the offscouring
of the earth, as their location would seem to
imply. They may, very possibly, be honest
people, but they have been driven from place
to place by the high price of lodgings, until the
calamity which sent the head of the family and
its chief support into the workhouse, sent them
also into those miserable quarters, which,
because they are so miserable and so sin-haunted,
are procurable at a low rent. "It's hardly the
place for you to go into," many a poor fellow
will say, "but if you would take the trouble, I'd
return ye a thousand thanks."

It was late in the autumn; the workhouse
had experienced a sudden influx of poor. The
slow and painful footsteps of some one were
heard descending the stone staircase from the
upper wards. A pause and a heavy sigh at
intervals proved that it was no easy matter for
the individual to come down.

"Ah, Richard! is that you? I thought you
were to be out and at work again before my
next visit."

"And so did I. I'm sound and heartwhole,
and I've no fancy for being here; but it's the
rheumatics in my knees that's keeping me back,
and now I've once got off my strength, ye see,
I'm obliged to take lower wages; only seven
shillings a week, and two shillings to pay out of
it for my lodging. My bit of a bed and things
are all safe: the woman has the use of 'em while
I'm here, and she'll take me back again when I
come out."

"Have you tolerably warm clothes to wear
when you take off this thick workhouse dress?"

''I can't say I have. My clothes are very
bad; and how am I to get any more out of seven
shillings a week? It can't be done."

The promise of an old suit when he left the
workhouse elicited one of Richard's brightest
looks of gratitude, with a reverential tug at
a stray lock of hair. I turned to go away, but
he said, "Mayhap you haven't heard of the
shocking thing in our ward: a young man
brought in half dead, that's been trying to
drown himself in the canal, and now he's trying
to starve himself to death."

"No. Can I see him?"

"Surely you can if you'll take the trouble to
come up." And Richard helped himself up by
the banisters much more nimbly than he came
down, saying as he did so, "He's in the little
ward, two beds from the door as you go in.
You'll see him the first thing."

And so I did. And the one glance was
sufficient to convey the impression of a depth
of misery which would need much gentleness
and consideration from those about him.

"That's the young man," said Richard, in
his zeal; and a deep frown gathered on the
patient's brow as he spoke.

His face was of a ghastly paleness; deep dark
hollows surrounded his eyes; and there was a
remarkable frown or scowl on his brow. He did
not speak or move, and he would receive no
food, except such as was actually forced down
his throat to prevent starvation. Nothing was
known of him, but that he had a mother who
had been there in great distress the day before,
but whom he did not seem to recognise, and who
said that he had been suffering in his head, and
had been trying in vain to get a livelihood by
singing about the streets. For some days, he
was talked to and read to apparently in vain, yet
the frown on his face looked less severe, and
the mutterings I sometimes heard under the
bedclothes sounded like "Thank you." One
day, when there was read to him the solemn
story of an agony endured for such as he, a tear
stole out from under his closed eyelid. Whether
he understood what was said, or whether this
tear was the result of his own pain and misery,
could not be told, but it seemed as if his feelings
were touched; the only other occasion on