and intimidated challenging sentinels by
roaring "OFFICER," which seemed a night
talisman, I need not, as I am just packing up
for Africa, stop any further to describe.

       AT WORK IN THE DARK.

THERE is an obscure little brush, mat, and
basket shop, in the Euston Road not very far
east of Saint Pancras Church, which has
outside its window an oil picture, representing
blind men and women at work upon brushes,
mats, and baskets. The shop is the repository
of an institution. There is a young man
who, though sightless, walks without a guide
about the streets of London, making punctual
calls for orders, east and west, in city or in
suburbs. He is town traveller for that shop in
the Euston Road. There is a blind man who
carries abroad heavy bundles of mats or bulky
basket parcels. He is porter to the shop, and
he walks great distances, faithfully trusting
in the humane friendliness of strangers on
the pavement, whom he asks for information
about crossings, turnings, or the numbering
of streets. There are scattered about London
many little families dependent upon blind
supporters, who have been saved from helpless
pauperism or a life of beggary, and who are
sustained by the aid given in that shop to
their industry. Blind men and women, shiftless
and poor, are taught the most profitable
trades they can follow in the little work-rooms
behind and above the shop. An active
and most intelligent superintendent—himself
blind—directs the enterprise, and gives his
mind to the development of new outlets for
the industry of workers without light. All
the books printed in this country for the
blind, on every system, with some from
France and America, are formed into a library;
which is to every poor blind man within reach
of it, a free lending library, and is accessible to
those who can afford to make return of help
for help, at the cost of but a very small
annual fee.

The whole enterprise has sprung out of
the active benevolence of a blind lady, the
daughter of a bishop. Not being herself in
any but the bodily sense,

           Shut up from outward light,
           To incorporate with gloomy night,

this lady has chosen to devote much of her
energy to the shedding of a light out of her
own heart upon the path of some among the
thirty thousand of her sightless countrymen
and countrywomen.

There are nearly thirty thousand blind,
people among us; fourteen thousand of them
belonging to the more helpless sex. Only
four thousand of them are below the age
of twenty; and, of the whole number,
not five in a hundred are in easy possession
of the means of life. Tens live without
labour, thousands are dependent for their
daily bread on national or charitable
support, if not upon the work of their own
hands.

Outside the workhouses there are, in the
United Kingdom, twenty-one institutions tor
the blind. That founded in Liverpool, sixty
or seventy years ago, is the oldest of these.
That of Saint George's, in London, is the
largest, and the only one to which admission
is entirely free. Altogether, they contain
room for about twelve hundred persons; and,
since the average time during which each
person is maintained in one of them seems to
be at least four years, the whole number of
fresh admissions into such asylums must be
about three hundred in every year. At
this rate, it is impossible to suppose that
more than one in seven of the blind people
among us has been benefited by existing
institutions, founded to supply some of their
wants.

It is the design of most of these establishments
to admit none but applicants under
the age of twenty-one. These, when admitted,
receive special education, and are taught
certain trades and occupations, for which sight
is not absolutely necessary. Basket-making,
cocoa-mat making, fancy mat-weaving, sack-
weaving, mattress-weaving, twine, line, and
cord-spinning, hassock-making, knitting and
crochet, by which they may earn some of
their bread after they have gone out again
into the world. The effort is an admirable
one, and it is made, we believe, everywhere in
a right spirit. But some of the occupations
taught, especially the knitting and crochet
often taught to girls, are remunerative to
nobody, while others do not often prove
sufficiently remunerative to the blind, because
of an inevitable disadvantage under which
blind workmen suffer.

Work done without help from the eyes of
the mechanic, and of which the accuracy has
to be tested at every step by the less rapid
help of touch, must of necessity be done
with a deliberation that cuts down almost to
one-half the earnings possible from piece-work.
The tool that is laid down has to be
felt for when it is picked up again: there is
no eyesight to tell the hand how it may dart
upon it with immediate precision.
Movements from place to place cannot be swift.
Slow and sure is a law imposed upon the
blind. The work of a beginner at mat-making
has to be sold for less than the cost
price of the material. Now the blind worker
who has learnt his trade cannot receive for
his work double pay, because the want of
sight has caused him to spend double time
over its execution.

There is another difficulty. The trades
taught to the blind are very few in number,
and these few are well stocked, as all callings
of men are, with active and competing
labourers. All the work of the hand in all
the trades they learn, if they could have it
all, would hardly feed the army of the blind
among us. But they cannot have it all, or