prison-cells. Here is light, here is air;--here it is more humane.
Where the sunbeam shines mildly in on the prisoner, there also will
the radiance of God shine into the heart.

BEGGAR-BOYS.

* * * * *

The painter Callot--who does not know the name, at least from
Hoffmann's "in Callot's manner?"--has given a few excellent pictures
of Italian beggars. One of these is a fellow, on whom the one rag
lashes the other: he carries his huge bundle and a large flag with the
inscription, "Capitano de Baroni." One does not think that there can
in reality be found such a wandering rag-shop, and we confess that in
Italy itself we have not seen any such; for the beggar-boy there,
whose whole clothing often consists only of a waistcoat, has in it not
sufficient costume for such rags.

But we see it in the North. By the canal road between the Venern and
Vigen, on the bare, dry rocky plain there stood, like beauty's
thistles in that poor landscape, a couple of beggar-boys, so ragged,
so tattered, so picturesquely dirty, that we thought we had Callot's
originals before us, or that it was an arrangement of some industrious
parents, who would awaken the traveller's attention and benevolence.
Nature does not form such things: there was something so bold in the
hanging on of the rags, that each boy instantly became a Capitano de
Baroni.

The younger of the two had something round him that had certainly once
been the jacket of a very corpulent man, for it reached almost to the
boy's ancles; the whole hung fast by a piece of the sleeve and a
single brace, made from the seam of what was now the rest of the
lining. It was very difficult to see the transition from jacket to
trowsers, the rags glided so into one another. The whole clothing was
arranged so as to give him an air-bath: there were draught holes on
all sides and ends; a yellow linen clout fastened to the nethermost
regions seemed as if it were to signify a shirt. A very large straw
hat, that had certainly been driven over several times, was stuck
sideways on his head, and allowed the boy's wiry, flaxen hair to grow
freely through the opening where the crown should have been: the naked
brown shoulder and upper part of the arm, which was just as brown,
were the prettiest of the whole.

The other boy had only a pair of trowsers on. They were also ragged,
but the rags were bound fast into the pockets with packthread; one
string round the ancl