five--on
her trembling fingers, misshapen by a life of toil.

[176] 'Yes! yes! and twice five make ten'--they say, to pacify her. It
is her last appeal to be taken home again; her proof that all is not
yet up with her; that she is, at all events, still as capable as those
joyous children.

"At the baths, a party of labourers are at work upon one of the great
brick furnaces, in a cloud of black dust. A frail young child has
brought food for one of them, and sits apart, waiting till his father
comes--watching the labour, but with a sorrowful distaste for the din
and dirt. He is regarding wistfully his own place in the world, there
before him. His mind, as he watches, is grown up for a moment; and he
foresees, as it were, in that moment, all the long tale of days, of
early awakings, of his own coming life of drudgery at work like this.

"A man comes along carrying a boy whose rough work has already
begun--the only child--whose presence beside him sweetened the father's
toil a little. The boy has been badly injured by a fall of brick-work,
yet, with an effort, he rides boldly on his father's shoulders. It
will be the way of natural affection to keep him alive as long as
possible, though with that miserably shattered body.--'Ah! with us
still, and feeling our care beside him!'--and yet surely not without a
heartbreaking sigh of relief, alike from him and them, when the end
comes.

"On the alert for incidents like these, yet of necessity passing them
by on the other side, I find [177] it hard to get rid of a sense that
I, for one, have failed in love. I could yield to the humour till I
seemed to have had my share in those great public cruelties, the
shocking legal crimes which are on record, like that cold-blooded
slaughter, according to law, of the four hundred slaves in the reign of
Nero, because one of their number was thought to have murdered his
master. The reproach of that, together with the kind of facile
apologies those who had no share in the deed may have made for it, as
they went about quietly on their own affairs that day, seems to come
very close to me, as I think upon it. And to how many of those now
actually around me, whose life is a sore one, must I be indifferent, if
I ever become aware of their soreness at all? To some, perhaps, the
necessary conditions of my own life may cause me to be opposed, in a
kind of natural conflict, regarding those interests which actually
determine the happiness of