ens the
passion of young wonder. It was never sung to--no one ever told to
it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as
it happened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron
realities of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any object
of dalliance; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little
hands to be betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be
the co-operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his
diversion, his solace; it never makes him young again, with recalling
his young times. The children of the very poor have no young times.
It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk
between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort
of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have
been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer
holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of
praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching,
of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child,
that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are
marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be
a woman, before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it
chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute,
sharpened; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the home
of the very poor is no home?

There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one.
It has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside
conveniences, of which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no
home. It is--the house of the man that is infested with many visiters.
May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the
many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their dwelling for
our poor roof! It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless,
purposeless visitants; droppers in, as they are called. We sometimes
wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very error of the position
of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate
in a medium--a plaguy suburban mid-space--fitted to catch idlers from
town or country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out
of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we
cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences.
At our time of life, to b