many-coloured rags, in another corner were
a few battered and broken jugs and pans;
there was a little earthen teapot on the
cold bars of the grate, and in the middle
of the room there was a handsome
toy. I saw a household and its home. The
father had been some months dead, the
mother expected in two or three days to
receive from God another child. She had
four, and " Have you lost any? " I asked,
looking down into the Egypt out of doors.
"I have lost nine!"

This woman and her sister were at work
together on cloth-tops for boots; each woman
could make one in about four hours, and
would receive for it threepence, out of which
sum she would have expended three farthings
on trimming or binding, and a fraction of a
farthing upon thread. She had parted with
her furniture piece by piece during the last
illness of her husband. I talked to the
children, and began to pull the great toy by the
string: a monkey riding on a cock. As the
wheels rolled, it made music, and up scrambled
the fourth child, a great baby boy. " His
grandmother gave him that," the mother said.
They had sold their bed, their clothes, but
they had kept the plaything!

We traced the current of another Nile
into another Egypt. These Niles have
their inundations, but to their unhappy
Egypts such floods only add another plague.
In summer time the courts and lanes
are rich with exhalation, and in autumn
their atmosphere is deadly. When May
comes round the poor creatures of this
district, pent up as they are, feel the spring
blood leaping faintly within them, and are
not to be restrained from pressing out in
crowds towards the green fields and the
hawthorn blossoms. They may be found dancing
in the tea-gardens of suburban public-houses,
rambling together in suburban meadows,
or crawling out to the Essex marshes. That
is the stir made by the first warm
sunshine of the year, and after that the work
goes on; the warm weather is the harvest
time of the hawkers and costermongers, who
at the best suffer severely during winter.

The summer heat lifts out of the filthy courts
a heavy vapour of death, the overcrowded rooms
are scarcely tenantable, and the inhabitants,
as much as time and weather will permit,
turn out into the road before their doors. The
air everywhere indeed is stifling, but within
doors many of the cottages must be intolerable.
I went into one containing four rooms
and a cellar, and asked, " How many people
live here I " They were counted up for me,
and the number came to six and twenty! The
present clergyman of this district—whose toil
is unremitting in the midst of the vast mass
of sorrow to which he is called to minister—
dwells upon wholesome ground outside the
district. Within it, there is not a parsonage
or any house that could be used as one, and
if there were—what man would carry wife or
children to a home in which they would drink
poison daily? The pastor is very faithful
in the performance of his duty; liberal
of mind, unsparing of toil; and, although the
reward of his office is as little as its toil is
great, and he is forced to take new duties on
himself to earn a living, yet I know that he
pours out his energies, his health, and all the
money he can earn beyond what suffices for a
frugal maintenance, upon his miserable
people. We have need to be thankful that
the Church has such sons. The Reverend
Theophilus Fitzmumble may be a canon here,
a master there, a rector elsewhere, and a vicar
of Little Pogis, with a thousand a year for
the care of a few hundred farmers and farm
labourers, who rarely see his face. Fitzmumble
may be a drone, the thousand a year paid
for his ministration at Little Pogis might be
better paid to a man who has daily to battle
with, and to help such misery as that of
which I speak in Bethnal Green. But let
us, I repeat, be thankful that Fitzmumble
is not the whole Church. It has sons content
to labour as poor men among the
poor, whose hearts ache daily at the sight
of wretchedness they cannot help; whose
wives fall sick of fevers caught at the
sick beds of their unhappy sisters. Of such
ministers the tables are luxurious, for they
who sit at meat know that their fare is less
by the portion that has been sent out to the
hungry; such men go richly clad in threadbare
cloth, of which the nap is perhaps
represented by small shoes upon the feet of little
children who trot to and fro in them to
school.

But, though the incumbent of this parochial
district about which I speak, is truly a
Christian gentleman, he has his body to maintain
alive, and dares not remain too long in the
poison bath of his unsewered district during
the hot summer days. He visits then only the
dying, and they are not few. " I have seen," he
said, " a dead child in a cellar, and its father
dying by its side, a living daughter covered
with a sack to hide her nakedness when I
went in, the rest all hungry and wretched,
furniture gone, and an open sewer streaming
down into a pool upon the floor." Again he
said, " I have seen in the sickly autumn
months a ruined household opposite the back
premises of a tripe and leather factory, which
is a dreadful nuisance to its neighbours; it
emits a frightful stench, and lays men, women,
and children down upon sick beds right and
left. In this room opposite the place, I have
seen the father of the family and three
children hopelessly ill with typhus fever, and
the eldest daughter with malignant small
pox, while the mother, the one person able
to stir about, sat on a chair in the midst of
them all deadened with misery. The place
by which this household was being murdered
has been several times indicted and lined as
a nuisance. Every time this has occurnd.
the proprietors have paid the fine and gone