or. This contrast was very
marked in England fifty years ago, and was comparatively unknown in our
own country--though to-day we can hardly lay to our souls the nattering
unction of such a difference. The rage for wealth has done for us in a
generation what caste did for England in a thousand years.

My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though
among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul
naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed
upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself
he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the
poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all
types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door
amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars
followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of
vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took
him each day from his home to his office. Wherever he encountered
the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of
assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them
money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty
where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in
plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very
frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was
appalled by the simplicity with which they accepted things as they were.
There was no restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It
was harrowing enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable
to see them acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned,
after a while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition;
but the refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving
did in purse.

The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed
cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed
like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of