promptly.

The gentlemen were turning away, when Sir Charles stopped them.

"Look here!" he said, taking the boy's arm and baring it, "this boy can
hardly be called a human being. See what a thin arm he has--how flaccid
and colorless the flesh seems--what an old face!--and I can scarcely
feel any pulse. Good heavens, get him some wine! A few hours will send
him to the d---- sure enough.... What are we to do for him, Glibton? I
say again, he is only part of a great problem. There must be hundreds
of thousands growing up like this child; and what a generation to
contemplate in all its relations and effects!"

The gentlemen were dashed by his earnestness.

"Oh, you're exaggerating," said Glibton; "there can't be such widespread
misery. Why, if there were, the people would be wrecking our houses."

"Ah!" replied the other, sadly, "will you wait to be convinced by that
sort of thing before you believe in their misery? I assure you what
I say is true. I could bring you a hundred clergymen to testify to it
to-morrow morning."

"God forbid!" said Glibton. "Good-night."

The right honorable gentleman extinguished the subject in his own little
brain with his big hat; but everywhere else the sparks are still aglow,
and he, with all like him, may wake up suddenly, as frightened women in
the night; to find themselves environed in the red glare of a popular
conflagration. Well for them then if they are not in charge of the
State machinery. What an hour will that be for hurrying to and fro
with water-pipes and buckets, when proper forethought, diligence, and
sacrifice would have made the building fireproof.

III.--A thorough-paced Reformer--if not a Revolutionary.

By the kindness and influence of Sir Charles Sterling, Ginx's Baby that
night, and long after, found shelter in the Radical Club. He gave
rise to a discussion in the smoking-room next evening that ought to be
chronicled. Several members of the committee supported his benefactor
in urging that the child should be adopted by the Club, as a pledge
of their resolve to make the questions of which he seemed to be the
embodied emblem subjects of legislative action. Others said that those
questions being, in their view, social and not political, were
not proper ones to give impulse to a party movement, and that
the entertainment in the Club of this foundling would be a gross
irregularity: they did not want samples of the material respecting
which they were theorizi