Where I am, are glorious dreamings,
  Science, genius, art divine,
And the great minds whom all honour
  Interchange their thoughts with mine:—
A few simple hearts are waiting,
  Longing, wearying, for me,
Far away where tears are failing,
  Where I fain would be!

Where I am, all think me happy,
  For so well I play my part,
None can guess, who smile around me,
  How far distant is my heart:—
Far away, in a poor cottage,
  Listening to the dreary sea,
Where the treasures of my life are,
  Where I fain would be!

PREVENTIBLE ACCIDENTS.

I AM, if you please, a bricklayer, and was
at work the other day on the foundations of
a house lately pulled down. Next door
tumbled over me, and I was drawn half-dead
out of the ruins.

I am, if you please, a little boy, and was at
play the other day among the bricks of a
house that had been sold as it stood, for
building materials, in lots. Lots at the top
and lots at the bottom were being pulled out,
and carted away indiscriminately. The whole
building, therefore, in one lot, to save trouble,
came down at once over me, and I am maimed
for life, before I have grown old enough to do
a stroke of business.

I am, if you please, a miner, and was at
work the other day in a colliery-shaft famous
for a great explosion, which had destroyed
fifty or sixty men, not many months before.
There was a fresh explosion, and a hundred-
and-twenty more were killed. I only had my
skin burnt off, and my leg broken.

I am, if you please, an able-bodied sailor,
and added my name to the ship's articles on
board an emigrant vessel. We were broken
up in a gale of wind, driven along by it, and
my mates were drowned by the hundred or
more. I escaped, for the fifth time in my
life, from shipwreck.

I am, if you please, a soldier, just returned
invalided from East Indian barracks, in which
I lay mortally sick, and in which many
hundreds have died. Mine is said to have been
a sickly station; but there are one or two
barracks in sicklier places that have almost
no mortality in them at all. Those barracks
have spacious and lofty sleeping-rooms, and
other things, that we had not at Killampore.

I am, if you please, a railway traveller, who
was shot into a tardy goods train near the
Shatteringham station, and have had my legs
made into jelly.

I am, if you please, a dweller in a rotten
court, dying of typhus fever.

I am any of these you please, or all of these
and a great many things more. I am the
victim of accident; and what accident may
be, is what I wish to know,—if I may wish so
much without being considered fussy.

I know very well that a district surveyor
whose duty it shall be to overlook the operations
of the builders, and check such as are
illegal or likely to endanger life, is one who
ought, as a gentleman, to be most courteous
and accommodating to all those with whom
he has to deal. He is bound in common and
professional politeness to suppose that Mr.
Brown the builder, who is pulling down or
running up a house, and Mr. Green the well-
known surveyor who is engaged to watch
Brown in a quiet, friendly way—he is bound,
I say, to suppose that these gentlemen know
their business, have a right to their own
usages; he ought to feel that he himself
would be but a Jack-in-office if he undertook
to meddle and obstruct. If a house should
tumble down for want of properly-applied
support, or because supporting parts had
been improperly removed, I see clearly that no
gentleman, who had been living among his
brethren as a Christian official, and overlooking
all their little trespasses, could be
politely made responsible for the calamity. I
see what a sad accident it is, and know that it
is nothing else. I am a surveyor myself, and
I think I may say that I understand these
matters.

I am a surgeon in a mining district, and
take leave to testify that mining accidents are
accidents, and that there is the end of the
whole matter. There is no more to be said
I attend several "fields,"—that is to say, I
contract to attend on men hurt in the pits,—
and I am never without "field patients" on
my books. There always must be such—
they are a natural and an essential portion of
my practice. I have a man or two killed, I
suppose, once a fortnight. That is nothing.
Sometimes, instead of one or two, there are
killed half-a-dozen at a time, and there is a
slight—a very slight—sensation in the parish.
Such accidents rarely appear even in the
country papers; and of course they are not
worth sending up to London. They belong
to mining life; and I don't believe that you
could ever get exact returns of the number of
lives lost annually in our mines and coal-pits.
You might as well have thought, in the old
coach days, of getting returns of the number
of coach-spills annually taking place over the
country. What country paper would be so
harsh as to hurt the character of the Tumbledon
Dart, and alarm the public by reporting
all its little stumbles on the road? I should
like to see the London papers getting from all
parts of the country special reports of mining
accidents, and dishing them up every morning
for the world to con over. The world would
be surprised if mines were watched as
carefully as railways. So would the masters be
surprised. When I first had a field, coming
young into the district, I was such a fool of
a new broom as to suggest to the great man
of the place how one might make impossible