per population, till my eyes smart, and
itch, and ache, and I shall have neither sight nor voice to read
"Coriolanus," which I must do this evening. To this Hull Railway Hotel
is attached a magnificent Railway Station (or rather _vice versa_),
shaped like a horseshoe, with a spacious broad pavement, roofed with a
skylight all round, making a noble ambulatory, of which I have availed
myself every day since I have been here for my walking exercise....

I was just starting for my walk to-day, when in came old Mr. Frost, my
Hull employer, President of the Literary and Scientific Institution,
before which I am giving my present readings, the principal lawyer, and,
I believe, Mayor of Hull,--a most charming, accomplished, courteous old
gentleman of seventy years and upwards, who, finding that I was about to
walk, proposed to accompany me, and we descended to the Station.

As we paced up and down, I remarked, lying in a corner, what I took at
first for a bundle of rags. On looking again, however, I perceived there
was a live creature in the rags--a boy, whose attitude of suffering and
weariness, as he crouched upon the pavement, was the most wretched thing
you can imagine. I knelt down by him, and asked him what ailed him: he
hardly lifted his face from his hands, and said, "Headache;" and then,
coughing horribly, buried his miserable face again. Mr. Frost, seeing I
still knelt by him, began to ask him questions; and then followed one of
those piteous stories which make one smart all over while one listens to
them; parental desertion, mother marrying a second time, cruelty from
the step-father, beating, starving, and final abandonment. He did not
know what had become of them; they had gone away to avoid paying their
rent, and left this boy to shift for himself. "How long ago is that?"
said Mr. Frost. "Before snow," said the lad,--the snow has been gone a
fortnight and more from this neighborhood, and for all that time the
child, by his own account, has wandered up and down, living by begging,
and sleeping in barns and stables and passages. The interrogatory was a
prolonged one: my friend Mr. Frost is slow by age, and cautious by
profession, and a man by nature, and so not irresistibly prompted to
seize up such an unfortunate at once in his arms and adopt it for his
own. In the course of his answers the boy, among other things, said, "I
wouldn't mind only for little brother." "How old is he?" "Going on two
year." "Where is he?"