neither said nor hinted anything to that
effect, and took no more note of the accidents
in factories with which machinery had nothing
to do, than of the yellow fevers in Jamaica or
of deaths by apoplexy anywhere. If the
newspaper to which we refer had obliged
us with the statistics of yellow fever as
an answer to our case, they would have
been as relevant as the above-quoted paragraph.

The writer then asks, whether we should
like to be held responsible for the death of
persons mangled by our printing machines,
and wishes to know why printers are not
called upon to fence their presses. Simply,
because nobody is aware of any accidents
that could in that way be prevented. If
skulls were smashed and limbs torn off in
printing offices by machines which could be
rendered harmless, we should, we trust, if we
were printers, not think it a hardship to
perform our duty by preventing what we could
prevent, or quarrel with a law that ordered
us to do so. Having propounded this most
sapient appeal direct, the Manchester newspaper
reverts to its pet idea of the accidents
that have nothing at all to do with the
question, as forming staple for an argument as
weighty, probably, as any other. While
Household Words, it says, is thus hounding
on the government to inflict upon the
manufacturers penalties from which other trades
are entirely free, we subjoin a sample of the
kind of accident which helps largely to make
up the factory inspectors' formidable table.
It is supplied by a correspondent of a
Bradford paper :

I have just been told by a millowner of three
accidents, which no doubt form part of the half-yearly
two thousand which are regularly reported. During
the dinner hour the lads had made a see-saw on an
empty oil cask in the mill-yard ; one of the lads was
thrown off and hurt his head. Another day a number
of donkeys which brought combers work were in the
same yard. The lads teased the donkeys, and one got
a severe kick from one of them. On another occasion
some lads were climbing up the crane-rope, when
one fell and was hurt. These occurred all in one
mill yard, in this town, and are served up by Dickens
as part of the horrible mutilations of the factory
occuplers.

The total number of accidents of this
kind, not arising from machinery, mentioned
in the last half-yearly report of the
inspectors, is eighty-seven, among which
eighteen ended in death, and twenty-two or
more in broken bones. The whole number
of accidents reported as having arisen from
machinery during the same half-year—and of
those only we have spoken—was one thousand
nine hundred and seventy- one. The Bradford
paper knows very well that we have
not served up the nonsense of its
correspondent to the public, and regarded
donkey's kicks as dreadful mutilations. We
have reason to know better. Fresh from the
reading of such a paragraph as that just
cited, we are privileged to say that we can
place ourselves in the position of the lads
who, under the shadow of a factory, teased
donkeys, and got a severe kick from one of
them. The effect of it is, by no means,
horrible mutilation.

MOTHER AND STEP-MOTHER.

IN FOURTEEN CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.

"WELL, after all, I suppose it is not very
much to be wondered at ! Your disconsolate
widowers are always the first to take
comfort. Poor dear Ann ! not dead two years
till September, and Edward married again.
The doctors ought to be ashamed of
themselves, putting it into one's head that he was
going into a decline. I am sure I couldn't
rest day or night for thinking of him."

"I congratulate you on the relief this news
must be to you, Fanny. Thomson says your
brother is looking better than he ever did in
his life ; and he tells me his wife is a decided
beauty."

"I cannot help thinking that he might
have given us warning of his intentions
earlier. It looks so awkward to know nothing
of one's own brother's affairs. I talked so
much about his grief that I shall get finely
laughed at when he comes home with a
young wife."

"You must endure with your usual
patience, Fanny. I do not think he has used
us particularly well ; but it seems she was
furious for him, and when a beauty of eighteen
falls violently in love with a man of six-
and-thirty, it must be allowed that it is
sufficient to turn his head."

"O ! you men always attach so much
importance to youth. For my part, I should
have thought Edward would have had too
much sense to be caught by a miss in her
teens ; besides what can such a girl know
about the management of children."

"I suppose she cannot know very much at
present ; but that comes by instinct. I do
not think she is likely to make the worse
stepmother because she is young ; and Frank
is such a pretty child that the danger will be
of her spoiling him."

"O, it will be well enough till she has
children of her own. Poor little Frank's
good looks will not do him much service
then ; and you may take my word for it,
Wilton, that it was a bad day for the poor
child when his father first saw this Helen
Macdonald."

Sir Edward Irwin, the subject of the foregoing
tête-à-tête, was a baronet descended from
a respectable family, and possessed of very
considerable estates in the North of England. He
had married, early in life, a lady of a sweet
and amiable temper, and, eschewing fashionable
gaieties, had found his happiness in
domestic enjoyment, and in literary and
scientific pursuits. The premature death
of his wife startled him from the even tenor