parish named Racine, who declares that he
can prove his descent from Racine the
dramatist. There is a Lesage too, to be met
with, and many other men whose names are
connected with ideas of noble race or noble
intellect. The daughters of these hand loom
weavers dress their hair with care, and will
not let themselves be seen in rags. The
mothers of the last generation were often
to be seen in the old French costumes, and
to this day hundreds work in such glazed
attics as were used by their forefathers
across the sea. Little as they earn, the
weaver-households struggle to preserve a
decent poverty and hide their cares. They
must have some pleasures too. In two or
three parts of the parish, there are penny
balls; there is a room also for penny
concerts, and there is a penny circus, "with a
complete change of riders." These places are
all quietly and well conducted; but are
chiefly supported by the surrounding
localities.

The fathers of these families lived when
their parents could afford to them the benefit
of dame schools. How courteously and
sensibly they often talk, and with what well
chosen words, I was amazed to hear. A
doll-maker, dying of consumption, who
certainly believed in long words too devoutly,
but who never misapplied them, talked in
periods well weighed and rounded, that were
in admirable contrast to the slip-slop gossip
of my dear friend Sir John Proaser. " One
of the weavers," said the clergyman of the
district (the Reverend Mr. Trivett), "asked
me to lend him Calvin's Institutes, and
when I told him that mine was a black
letter copy, he said that he should not
mind that in the least. Another asked once
for the Colloquies of Erasmus, and one
who was unmarried and working with his
brother, so that he had some shillings to spare,
wanted to know what it would cost to get a
copy of Smith's Wealth of Nations."

I mentioned just now a doll-maker—him I
found roasting himself by a large fire—a
man wasted and powerless—discussing on
what day he should go into Guy's Hospital.
There was a heap of bran in a corner, used
for doll-stuffing and for a children's bed also,
no doubt. Here, as elsewhere, however
large the family collected in one room, I
never saw more than a single bed. Sleeping
places were made usually on the floor. One
woman, rich in half-a-dozen chairs, showed
me with triumph how she made a first-rate
bedstead by putting them artfully together.
Before the doll-maker's bran sat a boy at a
stool, with a pile of broken tobacco-pipe at
his side, and some paste and strips of paper.
Each bit of paper as he pasted it he screwed
round a fragment of tobacco-pipe. These were,
perhaps, to be doll's bones, the basis of their
arms and legs. At a deal table near the
window a mother, who tottered with ill-
health, and a daughter about seventeen years
old, were measuring some lengths of calico.
The calico was to be cut up for doll's bodies,
or skins. The cutting out of bodies requires.
art and skill. The girl many days before had
pricked her thumb, the result was that it
had gathered, and was in a poultice. " She is
the only one of us, except me. able to make
the bodies," said the poor father, " and you
see—" He pointed to the crippled thumb, and
the mother looked down at it in a maze of
sorrow. They looked to its recovery for bread.

In another house I saw a room swept of all
furniture, through the distress that such
a pricked thumb had occasioned, and two
other homes I saw made wretched by the
accidental wounding of the husband's hand.

In one of them, an empty room rented at
half-a-crown a-week, there stood a woman all
by herself. She stood because she did not
possess a chair, and told us that they—she and
her husband—had that morning got some
work. They had been living on their furniture
for twelve weeks, because her
husband, who was a carpenter, had hurt his
hand. She had failed to get work until
the day before, when she obtained a pair
of stays to make, a chance job, for which
she would receive fourpence. She was a
young woman who would have been pretty
if she had been better fed. Alas, for the two
young hearts failing there together, for the
kisses of the thin and wasted lips that should
be full with youth and pleasure! " You earn
so little here, and could have a beautiful
cottage in the country for the price of this
room in Bethnal Green;—you scarcely could
be worse off if you went into the country."
They had done that, but the law of settlement
had forced them back again on Bethnal
Green.

Why should I make the readers' hearts as
heavy as my own was made by the accumulation
of these evidences of woe heaped up over
woe ? I saw families in cellars with wails
absolutely wet; in dismantled rooms covered
with dust and cobwebs, and containing
nothing but a loom almost in ruins; or
striving to be clean. One I found papering and
whitewashing his home, having obtained
means to do so from his landlord after seven
years of neglect. In another house a neighbour
had dropped in to tea in a company
dress of old black satin with plenty of cherry-
coloured ribbons. The daughter of that
house made elaborate and very pretty fringe-
tassels at fourteen pence for a hundred and
forty-four of them. The father of that house
had been two weeks dead. Everywhere I
found present sickness, and in many places
recent death. Only in one place I found
sullen despair, and there the room was full
of people—there was no fire in the hearth,
and there was no furniture, except a bed
from which a woman was roused who spoke
hoarsely and looked stupidly wild with
ragged dress and hair disordered. She may
have been drunk, but she could have sat as