headed by their priests. The clergy of the
Pardon always advance to receive and
welcome them.

After vespers there takes place a grand
procession. The young men and the maids,
in all the pomp of costume, walk in long close
lines, with infinite devotion, followed by bands
of sailors, who go barefooted and sometimes
almost unclad, if they happen to have made
vows when in fear of shipwreck. The
procession pauses at the cemetery of the town,
where prayers are said, and in these prayers it
is usual for the lord of the manor and his
family to join.

The whole level plain is covered by this
time with tents, under which pilgrims pass
the night in vigils, and in listening to the
religious songs. The minstrels go from one
part to another of the whole encampment,
singing no songs that are not of a serious
kind, because the whole of the first day of the
Pardon must be spent in holy thoughts.
Worldly amusements are to follow.

At dawn on the second day worldly
thoughts and pleasures are permitted to rush
in; then begin all the amusements of a fair,
and its excesses. The Kloers may then sing
their love-songs for the last time, if they
mean to hold by their choice of the priestly
calling. Then it is that those famous dramas
are performed, which last several days, and
which are the last existing remnants of the
Mysteries and Moralities that were the
delight of our forefathers in almost all
countries.

The Pardon here described I saw at
Rosporden in Finistère.

GROUND IN THE MILL.

"!T is good when it happens," say the
children,—"that we die before our time." Poetry
may be right or wrong in making little
operatives who are ignorant of cowslips say
anything like that. We mean here to speak
prose. There are many ways of dying.
Perhaps it is not good when a factory girl,
who has not the whole spirit of play spun
out of her for want of meadows, gambols
upon bags ot wool, a little too near the
exposed machinery that is to work it up, and is
immediately seized, and punished by the
merciless machine that digs its shaft into her
pinafore and hoists her up, tears out her left
arm at the shoulder joint, breaks her right
arm, and beats her on the head. No, that
is not good; but it is not a case in point, the
girl lives and may be one of those who think
that it would have been good for her if she
had died before her time.

She had her chance of dying, and she lost
it. Possibly it was better for the boy whom
his stern master, the machine, caught as he
stood on a stool wickedly looking out of
window at the sunlight and the flying clouds.
These were no business of his, and he was
fully punished when the machine he served
caught him by one arm and whirled him
round and round till he was thrown down
dead. There is no lack of such warnings to
idle boys and girls. What right has a gamesome
youth to display levity before the
supreme engine. "Watch me do a trick!"
cried such a youth to his fellow, and put
his arm familiarly with the arm of the
great iron-hearted chief. "I'll show you a
trick," gnashed the pitiless monster. A
coil of strap fastened his arm to the shaft,
and round he went. His leg was cut off,
and fell into the room, his arm was broken
in three or four places, his ankle was
broken, his head was battered; he was not
released alive.

Why do we talk about such horrible
things? Because they exist, and their
existence should be clearly known. Because
there have occurred during the last three
years, more than a hundred such deaths,
and more than ten thousand (indeed, nearly
twelve thousand) such accidents in our
factories, and they are all, or nearly all,
preventible.

These few thousands of catastrophes are
the results of the administrative kindness
so abundant in this country. They are all
the fruits of mercy. A man was lime-
washing the ceiling of an engine-room: he
was seized by a horizontal shaft and killed
immediately. A boy was brushing the dust
from such a ceiling, before whitewashing:
he had a cloth over his head to keept te
dirt from falling on him; by that cloth
the engine seized and held him to administer
a chastisement with rods of iron. A
youth while talking thoughtlessly took hold
of a strap that hung over the shaft: his
hand was wrenched off at the wrist. A man
climbed to the top of his machine to put the
strap on the drum: he wore a smock
which the shaft caught; both of his
arms were then torn out of the shoulder-joints
both legs were broken, and his head
was severely bruised: in the end, of course,
he died. What he suffered was suffered
in mercy. He was rent asunder, not perhaps
for his own good; but, as a sacrifice to
the commercial prosperity of Great Britain.
There are few amongst us—even among the
masters who share most largely in that
prosperity—who are willing, we will hope and
believe, to pay such a price as all this blood
for any good or any gain that can accrue to
them.

These accidents have arisen in the manner
following. By the Factory Act, passed in the
seventh year of Her Majesty's reign, it was
enacted, among other things, that all parts of
the mill-gearing in a factory should be
securely fenced. There were no buts and ifs
in the Act itself; these were allowed to step
in and limit its powers of preventing
accidents out of a merciful respect, not for the
blood of the operatives, but for the gold of
the mill-owners. It was strongly represented