take a peep down in our cellars, and look at our miserable starving
figures,
A-sitting idle on our empty sacks, and all ready to eat each other,
And a brood of little ones crying for bread to a heartbreaking Father
and Mother.
They havn't a rag of clothes to mend, if their mothers had thread
and needles,
But crawl naked about the cellars, poor things, like a swarm of common
black beadles.
If they'd only inquired before passing the Act, and taken a few such
peeps,
I don't think that any real gentleman would have set his face against
sweeps.
Climbing's an ancient respectable art, and if History's of any vally,
Was recommended by Queen Elizabeth to the great Sir Walter Raleigh,
When he wrote on a pane of glass how I'd climb, if the way I only knew,
And she writ beneath, if your heart's afeard, don't venture up the flue.
As for me I was always loyal, and respected all powers that are higher,
But how can I now say God save the King, if I ain't to be a Cryer?
There's London milk, that's one of the cries, even on Sunday the law allows,
But ought black sweeps, that are human beasts, to be worser off than
black cows?
Do _we_ go calling about, when it's church time, like the noisy Billingsgate
vermin,
And disturb the parson with "All alive O!" in the middle of a funeral
sermon?
But the fish won't keep, not the mackerel won't, is the cry of the
Parliament elves,
Everything, except the sweeps I think, is to be allowed to keep themselves!
Lord help us! what's to become of us if we mustn't cry no more?
We shan't do for black mutes to go a standing at a death's door.
And we shan't do to emigrate, no not even to the Hottentot nations,
For as time wears on, our black will wear off, and then think of our
situations!
And we should not do, in lieu of black-a-moor footmen, to serve ladies of
quality nimbly,
For when we were drest in our sky-blue and silver, and large frills, all
clean and neat, and white silk stockings, if they pleased to desire
us to sweep the hearth, we couldn't resist the chimbley.

THE DESERT-BORN[34]

"Fly to the desert, fly with me."--LADY HESTER STANHOPE.

[Footnote 34: For the purposes of his pun on "night-mare," Hood
adroitly utilizes the story of the famous Lady Hester Stanhope, whom
Kinglake, in his _Eothen_, first made familiar to so many of us. He
there speaks of the "quiet women in Somersetshire," and their