,
good day to yo,' he went his way home again, before the old minister
could fairly collect his scattered thoughts."

I do not know how it is that these workless minstrels are gradually
becoming rarer upon the streets than they were a few months ago.
Perhaps it is because the unemployed are more liberally relieved now
than they were at first. I know that now many who have concealed
their starving condition are ferreted out and relieved as far as
possible. Many of these street wanderers have gone home again
disgusted, to pinch out the hard time in proud obscurity; and there
are some, no doubt, who have wandered away to other parts of
England. Of these last, we may naturally expect that a few may
become so reconciled to a life of wandering minstrelsy that they may
probably never return to settled labour again. But "there's a
divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Let us
trust that the Great Creator may comfort and relieve them,
"according to their several necessities, giving them patience under
their sufferings, and a happy issue out of all their afflictions."

LETTER AND SPEECHES UPON THE COTTON FAMINE

LETTERS OF A LANCASHIRE LAD ON THE COTTON FAMINE.

The following extracts are from the letters of Mr. John Whittaker,
"A Lancashire Lad," one of the first writers whose appeals through
the press drew serious attention to the great distress in Lancashire
during the Cotton Famine. There is no doubt that his letters in The
Times, and to the Lord Mayor of London, led to the Mansion House
Fund. In The Times of April 14, 1862, appeared the first of a series
of letters, pleading the cause of the distressed operatives. He
said:-

"I am living in the centre of a vast district where there are many
cotton mills, which in ordinary times afford employment to many
thousands of 'hands,' and food to many more thousands of mouths.
With rare exceptions, quietness reigns at all those mills. . . . It
may be that our material atmosphere is somewhat brighter than it
was, but our social atmosphere is much darker and denser. Hard times
have come; and we have had them sufficiently long to know what they
mean. We have fathers sitting in the house at mid-day, silent and
glum, while children look wistfully about, and sometimes whimper for
bread which they cannot have. We have the same fathers who, before
hard times came, were proud men, who would have thought 'beggar' the
most opprobrious epithet you could