Chapter VI: Part 6

"Just so!" exclaimed Dorothy, her aged face beaming with benevolence; "that is the true way of making the world happy, for all to be trying to do their fellow-creatures some kindness. And then, you see, Jonah, when once the pleasure of thus acting began to be felt, there would soon be a pretty general willingness to make greater efforts, and even sacrifices of self-interest, as it is wrongly called, in order to experience greater pleasure, and likewise to increase the world's happiness."

"Truly, dame," said the pedlar, "you do me good to hear you talk. I'm but a poor scholar; yet I can tell, without book, that you must be right."

"But then, you see, Jonah," continued the dame, half unconscious of Jonah's last observation, "if every body were to say, 'Charity begins at home,' this general happiness would never begin. I like best, Jonah, to think of the example of the Blessed Being who came into the world to do us all good. He went about pitying the miserable and afflicted, and healing and blessing them. Charity did not begin at home with him, Jonah!"

The tears were now hastening down Jonah's rough cheeks. How forcible are lessons of goodness! how irresistibly the heart owns their power! Jonah could not support the conversation further. Dorothy's plain and unaffected remarks sunk deep in to his bosom; and when he rose up, and buckled on his pack once more, and the aged dame gave him "handsel," or first money for the day, by purchasing a few pins and needles, the poor pedlar bade her farewell in an accent that showed he felt more than common thankfulness for her kindness.

Alas! this is a world where good impressions are, too often, speedily effaced by bad ones. Jonah called, next at the gate of a wealthy squire, and, with hat in hand, asked for leave to go up to the kitchen-door and expose his wares to the servants. The squire refused; and when Jonah pleaded his poverty, and ventured to remonstrate, the squire frowningly threatened to set the dogs upon him, if he did not instantly decamp! Jonah turned away, and bitterly cursed the unfeeling heart of the rich man,—avowing, internally, that Dorothy Pyecroft was only a doating old fool,—for, after all, "Charity begun at home!"

Scarcely had the pedlar taken twenty steps from Dame Dorothy's cottage, ere the village clergyman knocked at her door. The dame knew the young parson's "rap-rap-rap!" It was quick and consequential, and unlike the way of knocking at a door used by any one else in Sturton, who thought it necessary to be so ceremonious as to give notice before they entered their neighbour's dwelling. Dame Dorothy ceased her spinning, and rose to open the door, curtesying with natural politeness, and inviting her visitor to be seated.

"Thank ye!" said the parson, raising his brows superciliously, putting the hook-end of his hunting-whip to his mouth, and striding about the floor in his spurred boots; "sit you down, I beg, Dame Pyecroft! sit you down—I'll not sit, thank ye!"

"I fear, sir, there is a great deal of suffering at present," said Dorothy, sitting down, and fixing her mild blue eyes upon the thoughtless young coxcomb, and feeling too earnestly in love with goodness to lose any opportunity of recommending its glorious lessons.

"Oh!—suffering!—ay!" observed the young clergyman, in a tone that showed he did not know what it was to think seriously: "you know there always was a difference between the rich and the poor."

"But do you not think, sir, that the rich might lessen the difference between themselves and the poor, without injuring themselves?" asked Dorothy, in a tone of mild but firm expostulation.

"Why, as to that, I can't say exactly," replied the parson, apparently brought to a halt in his thoughtlessness, and unable to extricate himself from the difficulty in which his ignorance placed him; "I can't say exactly; but, you know, Dame Pyecroft, some people have nothing to give away, though they may be better off than many of the poor: with such people, you know, Dame Pyecroft, the old proverb holds good, that 'Charity begins at home.'"

"I am grieved to hear _you_ quote that proverb, sir," said Dorothy; "I had just been exerting my poor wits to show that that saying was not a right one, in the hearing of poor Jonah the pedlar, before your reverence came in."

"Not a right saying, Dame Pyecroft? Why, you know it is a very old-established saying; and I think it a very shrewd one," rejoined the clergyman.

"But it is not so old as the New Testament, sir," replied Dorothy, with a winning smile; "and as shrewd as it is, do you think, sir, it was ever acted upon by your Great Master?"

The young clergyman took his hook-whip from his mouth, laid it on the table, took out his pocket-handkerchief, and, blushing up to the eyes, sat down before he attempted an answer to the good old dame's meek but powerful question.

"You will remember, Dame Dorothy," he said, at length, "that the Saviour was in very different circumstances to all other human beings that ever lived."

"But you will remember, sir," rejoined Dorothy, in the same mildly pertinacious manner, "that that Blessed Being said to his disciples, 'I have given you an example, that ye shall do as I have done to you: if I have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet.'"

"Yes: that is very beautiful," said the young clergyman, feeling the irresistible force of goodness, and speaking as if he had never read the passage in the book for himself: "the Saviour's example is very beautiful."

"And does not your reverence perceive how easy and delightful it would be for every one to begin to follow it?" immediately rejoined Dorothy, taking advantage of the good impression which, she saw, was being made on the mind of the young parson; "how easily might all who have enough give even of their little superfluity; how easily might we all do each other kindnesses which would cost us nothing! What solid pleasure this would bring back upon each of our hearts; and how surely it would lead us to make sacrifices, in order to experience the richer pleasure of doing greater good! Oh, sir," concluded the good old creature, with a tear that an angel might envy gliding down her aged and benevolent cheek, "I cannot think that any one knows the secret of true happiness who practises the precept—'Charity begins at home!'"

The young and inexperienced man gazed with a strange expression at his new and humble teacher. This was better preaching than he had ever heard or practised. His heart had been misled, but not thoroughly vitiated, by a selfish and falsely styled "respectable" education. He was too much affected to prolong the conversation then; but he became, from that time, a pupil at the feet of the aged Dorothy. His fine manners were laid aside. He became a real pastor. He was, from that day, more frequently in the cottages of the poor, twenty times over, than in the houses of the rich. He distributed of his substance to relieve the wants of others, and lived himself upon little. He forgot creeds to preach goodness, and pity, and mercy, and love. He preached till he wept, and his audiences wept with him. His life was an embodiment of the virtues he inculcated. And when, in the course of five short years, he laid down his body in the grave, a victim to the earnest conviction of his mind, the poor crowded around his hallowed resting-place with streaming eyes, and loving, but afflicted hearts, wishing they might be where he was when they died, since they were sure his presence, they said, of itself would make a heaven!

The young clergyman interred Dorothy Pyecroft but half a year before his own departure; and her last words were words of thankfulness that ever she had shown the young man the fallacy of the proverb—"Charity begins at home."

THE MINISTER OF MERCY.

Leicester has the appearance of a new town as you glance at it, in your rapid course on the Midland Counties Railway. And, if the "locomotives" halt for a few minutes at a point on the line where you have a full view of the goodly borough, the momentary impression which numerous ancient church-towers gives you of the real antiquity of the place is soon effaced by the extensive rows of newly-built houses that stretch away on every side till they appear to cover almost the entire populous area on which you are gazing. Successive gusts of prosperity for the manufacturers, occurring at various periods during the last forty years,—too often followed by severe depressions,—have in fact swelled the town to more than double its size at the close of the last century.

Yet a few days' sojourn in the borough would afford a lover of antiquity no inferior treat. The massive wall and arched vaults of a ruin, believed to have formed part of a temple of Janus during the ages that Britain was under Roman sway,—the ivied remains of the noble abbey where the imperious and vice-regal Wolsey "laid his bones,"—the sternly frowning "Newarke," or entrance-tower to the castle of the Grantmesnels, Bellomonts, Blanchmaines, De Montforts, Plantagenets, and other proud Earls of Leicester,—the solitary wooded mound on which the castle itself anciently stood,—the rich minute carving of the old churches,—the quaint interior of the old town-hall,—the grotesque exterior of much of the really ancient part of the town, composed of dwellings striped with timber and plaster, and decked with ornamented or overhanging gables,—dwellings wherein the soldiers of the fated kingly Crookt-back were billeted on the night before Bosworth-field,—these, and sundry other features of historic chronicle and change, could not fail to awaken eager interest in an antiquarian. Our story, however, concerns itself less with the outward than the inward, and regards rather the misery of the living than the pride of the dead.

Passing along the ancient line of highway from York to London, from the churchless burial-yard of St. Leonard, over the old North bridge, revealing the meandering Soar and the meadows of the old monks; by the curious Gothic west-door of the very ancient church of All Saints, that almost compels you to stop and look at it; and then, by the transverse streets, where the venerable "high cross" was taken down but a few years ago, and reaching that part of the ancient principal line of street called "Southgate," where modern Goths so lately took down that most interesting historical relic, the house in which the last regal Plantagenet slept the night before his death; (a splendid gable filled with a world of old English associations, and breathing a wholesome lesson to despotism from every atom of its mouldering substance!) the traveller would come to a ruinous-looking entry of a street on his right, bearing the chivalrous designation of "Red Cross Street." At the door of a low, crumbling house about halfway down this ancient bye-street, a dissenting minister stopped one winter's evening some eight-and-twenty years ago, to make his usual call of duty and benevolence. His gentle knock, however, was not answered; and, before he could repeat it, he was saluted hastily by a rich manufacturer, a member of his congregation, who was passing by on some business errand.

"You are the very man I wanted to see," said the minister in a very earnest tone, seizing the manufacturer by one arm, as if he feared the man of business might feel disposed to escape him: "I want half an hour's conversation with you, sir."

"But I cannot stay now, sir," replied the manufacturer; "will you join me in my morning ride in the gig to-morrow? Do, sir; it will do you good."

"I will, I will; thank you, sir," answered the minister, in a quick, nervous way that seemed to be usual with him; and they shook hands with great apparent fervour, and bid each other "good night."

The dissenting minister did not find entrance into the low, ruined-looking house, until a neighbour or two had forced open the door. A light was then brought, and a picture of affecting interest was revealed. A venerable silver-haired man lay breathing his last; and by the side of his humble bed, with folded hands, knelt she who had been the partaker of his joys and sorrows for sixty years, lost to all consciousness except that of mental prayer for her departing husband. The sound of the minister's voice seemed to arouse her for a moment; but she relapsed again into complete obliviousness of all things, save the one absorbing feeling created by the view of that gasping pallid form that lay before her. So the minister knelt, likewise; and when the neighbours who had entered with him had followed his example he prayed audibly and earnestly, yet so reverently and pathetically, that, while he prayed and wept, the neighbours thought themselves in the presence of some superior being, with a soul of compass to embrace and bless the whole human race, rather than a mere mortal. The face of the dying man kindled, too, with wondrous feeling, when he heard the sounds of that well-known and beloved voice, though he had seemed past consciousness but a few moments before. And when the minister paused in his petition, and saw the aged man's look fixed upon him, he said, with unutterable sweetness and tenderness,—

"William, my dear old friend, is all well within?—is your hope still blooming and full of immortality?"

The aged man raised his withered right hand with a last effort—waved it thrice—smiled with an ineffable smile,—and expired!

The minister was raising the aged and speechless widow from her kneeling posture, and placing her in an arm-chair, when her married daughter and several other neighbours entered the house of death. The minister recognised the daughter, and, after committing the widow earnestly to her care, emptied his waistcoat pocket of the silver it contained, and gave it, without counting, into the hands of the astonished young woman, who stood staring, while the good man snatched up his hat, and, saying "God bless you all! I'll call again to-morrow: God bless you all!" hurried away in a moment.——

A tall, grave-looking man, in the habit of a gentleman, bowed courteously to the dissenting minister, as he was turning the corner of the High Street, and, addressing him by his name, uttered the customary observations on the severity of the weather.

"Ah, my dear sir," spake the dissenting minister, unable, from the state of his feelings, to answer in the same strain, "I wish I had had you with me a quarter of an hour ago."

"Why, sir?" asked the gentleman.

"That you might have seen, for yourself, how a Christian can die," answered the minister.

"Ah!" replied the gentleman, with a look of serious concern, "there you, and all truly Christian ministers, find a field of more exalted enterprise than the whole world of turmoil and strife, put together, can furnish. I envy you, my dear sir—I envy you, more than I can express to you."

"It is, indeed, a field of exalted, of truly glorious enterprise, the visiting of death-beds—the pouring of heavenly consolation into the spirit that is leaving its frail clay tabernacle, and the gladdening of the human wretchedness which is left to mourn and weep," burst forth the good minister, forgetting that he stood in the bleak, cold, open street, and not in his pulpit; "but, oh, my good friend, what a dark, disconsolate scene would your Free-thinking make of the chamber of death, were it as universally spread as you wish it to be!"

"It is there where you always have the advantage of me, sir," rejoined the gentleman; "I have acknowledged it, again and again; and I feel the force of that reflection so powerfully, sometimes, that I half resolve to spend the remainder of my life in some scheme of philanthropy, and, meanwhile, join in persuading men to believe Christianity, although I do not believe its historical evidences are worth a straw——"

"But that would be wrong, sir!" said the minister interrupting the other, very earnestly.

"So I think, sir," continued the gentleman; "and yet I feel sometimes as if I should become guilty of a crime by striving to take away what I regard as a pleasant deceit from men,—their chance, by imbibing a full confidence in Christianity, of expiring not merely with calmness, but with rapturous joy and triumph. Free-thinking will never enable even the largest intellect, the most highly cultivated man, to die thus; much less will it give such a death to an imperfectly educated or ignorant man. But then, I reflect again, that it would be morally and veritably criminal in me to join in strengthening what I sincerely believe to be falsehood."

"And so it would, sir," said the dissenting minister, taking the gentleman's arm, who offered it, that they might walk on to avoid some degree of the cold; "so it would, sir: it would render you a very contemptible creature. Let me tell you, sir, that with all the delight I experience in fulfilling some little of my duty as a Christian minister, the remembrance of it would not move me one inch towards the bed of a dying man with the view of offering him the consolations of revealed religion—if I believed such consolations to be a mere farce. I would scorn to mock him with false hopes. You know how deeply I regret your scepticism, my dear sir; but I would not see you veil it through a spurious tenderness. No, sir: truth and sincerity are the purest jewels in human character; even pity and benevolence, themselves, are gems of inferior water."

"I wish all Christians were like yourself," said the gentleman, after a pause of admiration for the great and good being with whom he felt it a real privilege to walk; "but I see so little practice of goodness from the hundreds around me who profess a religion that enthrones it, that the sight tends much to confirm me in my old opinions."

"Indeed, sir," observed the minister, in a very grave tone, "I must tell you that you will be guilty of great self-deceit, if you imagine that the wickedness of hypocrites, or the slackness of lukewarm professors, will form a valid excuse for your rejection of Christ's mission, should you, one day, prove it true."

"I know it, my dear sir," replied the gentleman; "I know it well; though I thank you for your kind and well-meant zeal in reminding me of it. I will tell you one thought of mine, however,—and it is one that fixes itself very forcibly before my judgment,—if callousness to the sufferings of their workmen continues to increase among the manufacturers as rapidly as it has increased for the last ten years, Christianity will be openly scoffed at by the poor of the next generation, in the very streets where we are now walking."

"You have only expressed what I expressed last Sunday morning from my own pulpit, sir," returned the minister,—seeming too deeply affected with his strong belief of the probability of such an event to be able to add more.

"I hear that the wretched framework-knitters suffer more and more from abatements of wages and other encroachments upon their means of subsistence, of the most unfeeling and unprincipled character," resumed the gentleman; "and although hundreds are without work at the present time, and the complaints of suffering from want of food, fuel, and clothing, are so loud and frequent, yet not a single rich manufacturer of the many that profess religion, in Leicester, proposes to open a public subscription for the poor, according to the humane custom of past times. I heard a whisper that you had begun to stir up the languid charity of some of your friends towards the commencement of a subscription: was I rightly informed, sir?"

"It is the very subject I intend to broach to Mr.——, to-morrow morning," replied the minister, with an enthusiastic glow suffusing his expressive face.

"Please place your own name for that sum somewhere on the list," said the gentleman, taking a note for 20_l._ out of his pocket-book and giving it to the minister.

The good preacher was trying to stifle his grateful tears, in order to thank the sceptic,—but the latter bowed and strode away; and the good preacher, as he walked towards his own house in deep reflective silence, had many thoughts of the true interpretation of such words as "infidel" and "Christian" that would have startled his audience, if he had uttered them before it on the following Sunday.

In spite of an agonised bodily system, the minister was early abroad the next morning, and his glorious brow beamed with pleasure, when the maid-servant announced that the rich manufacturer's gig was at the door, and the conversation was near that he hoped would result in the effective commencement of a subscription to relieve the misery, and hunger, and cold, and disease, under which the depressed stockingers and their families were groaning that severe winter. Yet the philanthropist, with all his guilelessness, knew the man he had to deal with, and proceeded in a somewhat circumlocutory way to his object. In the end, he enforced the claims of man as a brother, the admirableness and divinity of charity, and the indefeasible rights of the working man as a substantial agent in the creation of wealth, with so much of the potentiality of his transcendent eloquence, that the manufacturer, in spite of the resistance his heart's avarice made to the godlike theme, assented to the proposal that he should begin the public subscription. But how heart-stricken with grief and shame did the golden-tongued pleader feel when, on producing the little book he had prepared for collecting the names of subscribers, the rich manufacturer hesitated as soon as he had written his name, bit the end of his cedar pencil, and then hastily put five pounds at the end of his name! The minister did not thank him, for his soul was too noble to permit his tongue to utter one word which his heart would not accompany: but he had, again, some peculiar thoughts about the true interpretation of the words "infidel" and "Christian."

Neither was the good man to be damped by such an inauspicious beginning; but begging Mr.——would not drive on again till he, the minister, had got safely out of the gig, bid the rich churl "good morning," posted away to the house of another "of whom the world was not worthy," but with whom Leicester was likewise blessed at that time: the Rev. Mr. Robinson, vicar of St. Mary's, stayed till that good man formed a little collecting book, and then left him to divide the work of canvassing the town for names to form the subscription list. Assisted occasionally by others, the dissenting minister persevered, till, in the lapse of several days, and at the cost to himself of excruciating visitations of increased pain in the night season, he completed such a list as gave effectual relief to the hundreds of his suffering fellow-creatures then inhabiting Leicester.

That labour was no sooner ended than he commenced a close inquiry into the real state of the staple trade of the town; and, finding that the reports of oppression and extortion, the foul fruits of avaricious competition, were not exaggerated, he sat down and wrote an appeal in behalf of the suffering framework-knitters that might have jeopardied the favour and acceptance of a less able preacher with the wealthier members of his congregation.

It might be imprudent to go on: the starving stockingers of Leicester have no longer such an advocate; and, as highly as some profess to esteem the memory of the truly good, they may feel angered by this introduction of a portrait which, as imperfectly as it is delineated, they will already have recognised to their shame. If a stranger to old Leicester should ask whose is the portrait this faint limning is intended to call to memory, it is hoped it will not be deemed an act of desecration to introduce, in a volume of merely fugitive essays, a name too truly holy to be lightly mentioned,—a name inscribed, ineffaceably, in English literature, by the sunbeam of his peerless and hallowed eloquence to whom it belonged,—the name of ROBERT HALL.

"MERRIE ENGLAND"—NO MORE!

The present generation,—the generation succeeding that in which the eloquent philanthropist and the sceptical gentleman lived and conversed,—has it witnessed any verification of the serious prophecy uttered in that winter evening's conversation in the streets of Leicester? The following brief but truthful sketch will furnish an answer.

On an April morning in forty-two—scarcely four years bygone,—a group of five or six destitute-looking men were standing on a well-known space in Leicester, where the frustrum of a Roman milestone (surmounted, in true Gothic style, with a fantastic cross) was preserved within an iron palisade, and where the long narrow avenue of Barkby Lane, enters the wide trading street called Belgrave Gate. The paleness and dejection of the men's faces, as well as the ragged condition of their clothing, would have told how fearfully they were struggling with poverty and want, if their words had not been overheard.

"Never mind the lad, John," said the tallest and somewhat the hardest-featured man of the party; "he can't be worse off than he would have been at home, let him be where he will. What's the use of grieving about him? He was tired of pining at home, no doubt, and has gone to try if he can't mend his luck. You'll hear of him again, soon, from some quarter or other."

"But I can't satisfy myself about him, in that way, George," replied the man to whom this rough exhortation was addressed; "if the foolish lad be drawn into company that tempts him to steal, I may have to hear him sentenced to transportation, and that would be no joke, George."

"I see nothing so very serious, even in that," observed another of the group; "I would as lief be transported to-morrow as stay here to starve, as I've done for the last six months."

"It would seem serious to me, though," rejoined John, "to see my own child transported."

"Why, John, to men that scorn to steal, in spite of starvation," resumed George, "it's painful to see any child, or man either, transported: but where's the real disgrace of it? The man that pronounces the sentence is, in nine cases out of ten, a bigger villain than him that's called 'the criminal.' Disgrace is only a name—a mere name, you know, John."

"I'm aware there's a good deal o' truth in that," replied John; "the names of things would be altered a good deal, if the world was set right: but, as wrong as things are now, yet I hope my lad will never steal, and have to be sentenced to transportation. I've often had to hear him cry for bread, since he was born, and had none to give him: but I would sooner see him perish with hunger than live to hear him transported, for I think it would break my heart;—and God Almighty forbid I ever should have to hear it!"

"Goddle Mitey!" said George, pronouncing the syllables in a mocking manner, and setting up a bitter laugh, which was joined by every member of the group, except the mournful man who had just spoken; "who told thee there was one? Thy grandmother and the parsons? Don't talk such nonsense any more, John! it's time we all gave it over: they've managed to grind men to the dust with their priestcraft, and we shall never be righted till we throw it off!"

"No, no," chimed in another, immediately; "they may cant and prate about it: but, if their God existed, he would never permit us to suffer as we do!"

"Well, I'm come seriously to the same conclusion," said one who had not spoken before, and was the palest and thinnest of the group: "I think all their talk about a Providence that disposes the lot of men differently here, 'for His Own great mysterious purposes,' as they phrase it, is mere mysterious humbug, to keep us quiet. What purpose could a being have, who, they say, is as infinitely good as he is infinitely powerful, in placing me where I must undergo insult and starvation, while He places that man,—the oppressor and grinder, who is riding past now, in his gig,—in plenty and abundance?"

"Right, Benjamin," said George; "they can't get quit of their difficulty, quibble as they may: if they bedaub us with such nicknames as 'Atheistical Socialists,' we can defy them to make the riddle plainer by their own Jonathan Edwards, that they say good Robert Hall read over thirteen times, and pronounced 'irrefragable.'"

"Just so," resumed Benjamin, "whether man be called a 'Creature of Circumstance,' or a 'Creature of Necessity,' it amounts to the same thing. And, then, none of the Arminian sects can make out a case: they only prove the same thing as the Calvinist and the Socialist, when their blundering argument is sifted to the bottom."

"So that, if there be a Providence," continued George, "it has appointed, or permitted,—which they like, for it comes to the same,—that old——should fling the three dozen hose in your face last November, and that you should be out of work, and pine ever since; it appointed that I should get a few potatoes or a herring, by begging, or go without food altogether, some days since Christmas; and that each of us here, though we are willing to work, should have to starve; while it appointed that the mayor should live in a fine house, and swell his riches, by charging _whole_ frame-rents, month after month, to scores of poor starving stockingers that had from him but half week's work."

"And, with all their talk about piety," rejoined Benjamin, "I think there is no piety at all in believing in the existence of such a Providence: and since, it appears, it can't be proved that Providence is of any other character, if there be One at all, I think it less impious to believe in None."

John stood by while this conversation was going on; but he heard little of it,—for his heart was too heavy with concern for his child,—and, in a little time, he took his way, silently and slowly, towards other groups of unemployed and equally destitute men, who were standing on the wider space of ground, at the junction of several streets,—a locality known by the names of "the Coal-hill," and "the Hay-market," from the nature of the merchandise sold there, at different periods, in the open air.

"Have you found the lad yet?" said one of John's acquaintances, when he reached the outermost group.

"No, William," replied the downcast father; "and I begin to have some very troublesome fears about him, I'll assure you."

"But why should you, John?" expostulated the other; "he's only gone to try if he can't mend himself——Look you, John!" he said, pointing excitedly at what he suddenly saw; "there he goes, with the recruiting serjeant!"

The father ran towards the soldier and his child; and every group on the Coal-hill was speedily in motion when they saw and heard the father endeavouring to drag off the lad from the soldier, who seized the arm of his prize, and endeavoured to detain him. An increasing crowd soon hemmed in the party,—a great tumult arose,—and three policemen were speedily on the spot.

"Stick to your resolution, my boy!" cried the soldier, grasping the lad's arm with all his might; "you'll never want bread nor clothes in the army."

"But he'll be a sold slave, and must be shot at, like a dog!" cried the father, striving to rescue his child,—a pale, tall stripling, who seemed to be but sixteen or seventeen years of age.

"Man-butcher!—Blood-hound!" shouted several voices in the crowd: whereat the policemen raised their staves, and called aloud to the crowd to "stand back!"

"I demand, in the Queen's name, that you make this fellow loose his hold of my recruit!" said the soldier, in a loud, angry tone, to the policemen; two of whom seemed to be about obeying him, when a dark, stern-browed man among the crowd, of much more strong and sinewy appearance than the majority of the working multitude who composed it, stepped forward, and said,—

"Let any policemen touch him that dare! If they do they shall repent it! There's no law to prevent a father from taking hold of his own child's arm to hinder him from playing the fool!"

The men in blue slunk back at these words; and the soldier himself seemed intimidated at perceiving the father's cause taken up by an individual of such determination.

"Tom," said the determined man to the lad, "have you taken the soldier's money?"

"Not yet," answered the lad, after a few moments' hesitation.

"Then he shall have my life before he has thee!" said the father, whose heart leaped at the answer, and infused so much strength into his arm, that with another pull he brought off his lad, entirely, from the soldier's hold. The crowd now burst into a shout of triumph; and when the soldier would have followed, to recapture his victim, the stern-browed man confronted him with a look of silent defiance; and the red-coat, after uttering a volley of oaths, walked off amidst the derision of the multitude.

"Don't you think you were a fool, Tom, to be juggled with that cut-throat?" said the stern-browed man to the lad, while the crowd gathered around him and his father.

"I wasn't so soon juggled," replied the lad; "he's been at me this three months; but I never yielded till this morning, when I felt almost pined to death, and he made me have some breakfast with him,—but he'll not get hold of me again!"

"That's right, my lad!" said one of the crowd; "the bloody rascals have not had two Leicester recruits these two years; and I hope they'll never have another."

"No, no, our eyes are getting opened," said another working-man; "they may be able to kill us off by starvation, at home; but I hope young and old will have too much sense, in future, to give or sell their bodies to be shot at, for tyrants."

"Ay, ay, we should soon set the lordlings fast, if all working-men refused to go for soldiers," said another.

"So we should, Smith," said a sedate-looking elderly man; "that's more sensible than talking of fighting when we've no weapons, nor money to buy 'em, nor strength to use 'em."

"Then we shall wait a long while for the Charter, if we wait till we get it by leaving 'em no soldiers to keep us down," said a young, bold-looking man, with a fiery look; "for they'll always find plenty of Johnny Raws ready to list in the farming districts."

"And we shall wait a longer while still if we try to get it by fighting, under our present circumstances," answered the elderly man, in a firm tone; "that could only make things worse, as all such fool's tricks have ended, before."

"You're right, Randal, you're right!" cried several voices in the crowd; and the advocate of the bugbear "physical force" said not another word on the subject.

"No, no, lads!" continued the "moral force" man, "let us go on, telling 'em our minds, without whispering,—and let us throw off their cursed priestcraft,—and the system will come to an end,—and before long. But fighting tricks would be sure to fail; because they're the strongest,—and they know it."

"Yes, it must end,—and very soon," observed another working-man; "the shopkeepers won't be long before they join us; for they begin to squeak, most woefully."

"The shopkeepers, lad!" said the dark-looking man, who had confronted the soldier; "never let us look for their help: there is not a spark of independence in any of 'em: they have had it in their power, by their votes, to have ended misrule, before now, if they had had the will."

"Poor devils! they're all fast at their bankers', and dare no more vote against their tyrants than they dare attempt to fly," said another.

"There is no dependence on any of the middle class," said the dark-looking man; "they are as bad as the aristocrats. You see this last winter has passed over, entirely, without any subscription for the poor, again,—as severe a winter as it has been."

"Ay, and work scarcer and scarcer, every day," said another.

"They say there are eight hundred out o'work now, in Leicester," said the elderly, sedate man, who had spoken before; "and I heard a manufacturer say there would be twice as many before the summer went over: but he added, that the people deserved to be pinched, since they would not join the Corn Law Repealers."

A burst of indignation, and some curses and imprecations, followed.

"Does he go to chapel?" asked one.

"Yes; and he's a member of the Charles Street meeting," said the elderly man.

"There's your religion, again!"—"There's your saintship!"—"There's your Christianity!"—"There's their Providence and their Goddle Mitey!"—were the varied indignant exclamations among the starved crowd, as soon as the answer was heard.

"I should think they invented the Bastile Mill, while they were at chapel!" said one.

"Is it smashed again?" asked another.

"No; but it soon will be," answered the man who confronted the soldier.

These, and similar observations, were uttered aloud, in the open street, at broad day, by hundreds of starved, oppressed, and insulted framework-knitters, who thus gave vent to their despair. Such conversations were customary sounds in John's ears, and, having recovered his son, he took him by the arm, after this brief delay, and, walking slowly back towards the Roman milestone, the two bent their steps down the narrow street called Barkby Lane.

After threading an alley, they reached a small wretchedly furnished habitation; and the lad burst into tears, as his mother sprung from her laborious employ at the wash-tub, and threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him. Two or three neighbours came in, in another minute, and congratulating the father and mother, on their having found their son, a conversation followed on the hatefulness of becoming "a paid cut-throat for tyrants," the substance of which would have been as unpleasing to "the powers that be" as the conversation in the street, had they heard the two. The entry, into the squalid-looking house, of another neighbour, pale and dejected beyond description, gave a new turn to the homely discourse.

"Your son has come back, I see, John," said the new-comer, in a very faint voice: "I wish my husband would come home."

"Thy husband, Mary!" said John; "why, where's he gone? Bless me, woman, how ill you look!—What's the matter?"

The woman's infant had begun to cry while she spoke; and she had bared her breast, and given it to the child: but—Nature was exhausted! there was no milk;—and, while the infant struggled and screamed, the woman fainted.

She recovered, under the kindly and sympathetic attention of the neighbours; and the scanty resources of the group were laid under contribution for restoring some degree of strength, by means of food, to the woman and her child. One furnished a cup of milk, another a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, another brought a little bread; and when the child was quieted, and the mother was able, she commenced her sad narrative. She had not, she said, tasted food of any kind for a day and two nights: she had pawned or sold every article of clothing, except what she had on, and she was without a bonnet entirely: nor had her husband any other clothes than the rags in which he had gone out, two hours before, with the intent to try the relieving officer, once more, for a loaf, or a trifle of money: to complete their misery, they owed six weeks' rent for the room in which lay the bag of shavings that formed their bed; and, if they could not pay the next week's rent, they must turn out into the street, or go into the Bastile.

Her recital was scarcely concluded, when the sorrowful husband returned. He had been driven away by the relieving officer, and threatened with the gaol, if he came again, unless it was to bring his wife and child with him to enter the Union Bastile!—and the man sat down, and wept.

And then the children of misery mingled their consolations,—if reflections drawn from despair could be so called,—and endeavoured to fortify the heart of the yielding man, by reminding him that they would not have to starve long, for life, with all its miseries, would soon be over.

"I wonder why it ever begun!" exclaimed the man who had been yielding to tears, but now suddenly burst out into bitter language: "I think it's a pity but that God had found something better to do than to make such poor miserable wretches as we are!"

"Lord! what queer thoughts thou hast, Jim!" said the woman who had previously fainted, and she burst into a half-convulsive laugh.

"Indeed, it's altogether a mystery to me," said the man who had so recently found his son; "we seem to be born for nothing but trouble. And then the queerest thing is that we are to go to hell, at last, if we don't do every thing exactly square. My poor father always taught me to reverence religion; and I don't like to say any thing against it, but I'm hard put to it, at times, Jim, I'll assure ye. It sounds strange, that we are to be burnt for ever, after pining and starving here; for how can a man keep his temper, and be thankful, as they say we ought to be, when he would work and can't get it, and, while he starves, sees oppressors ride in their gigs, and build their great warehouses?"

"It's mere humbug, John, to keep us down: that's what it is!" said Jim: "one of these piety-mongers left us a tract last week; and what should it contain but that old tale of Bishop Burnet, about the widow that somebody who peeped through the chinks of the window-shutters saw kneeling by a table with a crust of bread before her, and crying out in rapture, 'All this and Christ!' I tell thee what, John, if old Burnet had been brought down from his gold and fat living, and had tried it himself, I could better have believed him. It's a tale told like many others to make fools and slaves of us: that's what I think. Ay, and I told the long-faced fellow so that fetched the tract. He looked very sourly at me, and said the poor did not use to trouble themselves about politics in his father's time, and every body was more comfortable then than they are now. 'The more fools were they,' said I: 'if the poor had begun to think of their rights sooner, instead of listening to religious cant, we should not have been so badly off now:' and away he went, and never said another word.

"But I don't like to give way to bad thoughts about religion, after all, Jim," said John: "it's very mysterious—the present state of things: but we may find it all explained in the next life."

"Prythee, John," exclaimed the other, interrupting him, impatiently, "don't talk so weakly. That's the way they all wrap it up; and if a guess in the dark and a 'maybe' will do for an argument, why any thing will do. Until somebody can prove to me that there _is_ another life after this, I shall think it my duty to think about this only. Now just look at this, John! If there be another life after this, why the present is worth nothing: every moment here ought to be spent in caring for eternity; and every man who really believes in such a life would not care how he passed this, so that he could but be making a preparation for the next: isn't that true, John?"

"To be sure it is, Jim; and what o' that?"

"Why, then, tell me which of 'em believes in such a life. Do you see any of the canting tribe less eager than others to get better houses, finer chairs and tables, larger shops, and more trade? Is old Sour-Godliness in the north, there, more easily brought to give up a penny in the dozen to save a starving stockinger than the grinders that don't profess religion? I tell thee, John, it's all fudge: they don't believe it themselves, or else they would imitate Christ before they tell us to be like him!"

Reader! the conversation shall not be prolonged, lest the object of this sketch should be mistaken. These conversations are _real_: they are no coinages. Go to Leicester, or any other of the suffering towns of depressed manufacture, where men compete with each other in machinery till human hands are of little use, and rival each other in wicked zeal to reduce man to the merest minimum of subsistence. If the missionary people—and this is not said with a view to question the true greatness and utility of their efforts—if they would be consistent, let them send their heralds into the manufacturing districts, and first convert the "infidels" there, ere they send their expensive messengers to India. But let it be understood that the heralds must be furnished with brains, as well as tongues; for whoever enters Leicester, or any other of the populous starving hives of England, must expect to find the deepest subjects of theology, and government, and political economy, taken up with a subtlety that would often puzzle a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. Whoever supposes the starving "manufacturing masses" know no more, and can use no better language, than the peasantry in the agricultural counties, will find himself egregiously mistaken. 'Tis ten to one but he will learn more of a profound subject in one hour's conversation of starving stockingers than he would do in ten lectures of a university professor. Let the missionary people try these quarters, then; but let their heralds "know their business" ere they go, or they will make as slow progress as Egede and the Moravians among the Greenlanders. One hint may be given. Let them begin with the manufacturers; and, if they succeed in making _real_ converts to Christianity in that quarter, their success will be tolerably certain among the working-men, and tolerably easy in its achievement.

There is no "tale" to finish about John or his lad, or Jem and his wife. They went on starving,—begging,—receiving threats of imprisonment,—tried the "Bastile" for a few weeks,—came out and had a little work,—starved again; and they are still going the same miserable round, like thousands in "merrie England." What are your thoughts, reader?

SETH THOMPSON, THE STOCKINGER; OR, "WHEN THINGS ARE AT THE WORST, THEY BEGIN TO MEND."

Leicestershire stockingers call that a false proverb. "People have said so all our lives," say they; "but, although we have each and all agreed, every day, that things were at the worst, they never begun to mend yet!" This was not their language sixty years ago, but it is their daily language _now_; and the story that follows is but, as it were, of yesterday.

Seth Thompson was the only child of a widow, by the time that he was six years old, and became a "winding boy," in a shop of half-starved framework-knitters at Hinckley,—a kindred lot with hundreds of children of the same age, in Leicestershire. Seth's mother was a tender mother to her child; but he met tenderness in no other quarter. He was weakly, and since that rendered him unable to get on with his winding of the yarn as fast as stronger children, he was abused and beaten by the journeymen, while the master stockinger, for every slight flaw in his work,—though it always resulted from a failure of strength rather than carelessness,—unfeelingly took the opportunity to "dock" his paltry wages.

Since her child could seldom add more than a shilling or fifteen-pence to the three, or, at most, four shillings, she was able to earn herself,—and she had to pay a heavy weekly rent for their humble home,—it will readily be understood that neither widow Thompson nor Seth were acquainted with the meaning of the word "luxury," either in food or habits. A scanty allowance of oatmeal and water formed their breakfast, potatoes and salt their dinner, and a limited portion of bread, with a wretchedly diluted something called "tea" as an accompaniment, constituted their late afternoon, or evening meal; and they knew no variety for years, winter or summer. The widow's child went shoeless in the warm season, and the cast-off substitutes he wore in winter, together with lack of warmth in his poor mother's home, and repulses from the shop fire by the master and men while at work, subjected him, through nearly the whole of every winter, to chilblains and other diseases of the feet. Rags were his familiar acquaintances, and, boy-like, he felt none of the aching shame and sorrow experienced by his mother when she beheld his destitute covering, and reflected that her regrets would not enable her to amend his tattered condition.

Seth's mother died when he reached fifteen, and expressed thankfulness, on her death-bed, that she was about to quit a world of misery, after being permitted to live till her child was in some measure able to struggle for himself. In spite of hard usage and starvation, Seth grew up a strong lad, compared with the puny youngsters that form the majority of the junior population in manufacturing districts. He was quick-witted, too, and had gathered a knowledge of letters and syllables, amidst the references to cheap newspapers and hourly conversation on politics by starving and naturally discontented stockingers. From a winding-boy, Seth was advanced to the frame, and, by the time he had reached seventeen, was not only able to earn as much as any other stockinger in Hinckley, when he could get work, but, with the usually improvident haste of the miserable and degraded, married a poor "seamer," who was two years younger than himself.

Seth Thompson at twenty-one, with a wife who was but nineteen, had become the parent of four children; and since he had never been able to bring home to his family more than seven shillings in one week, when the usual villainous deductions were made by master and manufacturer, in the shape of "frame-rent" and other "charges,"—since he had often had but _half_-work, with the usual deduction of _whole_ charges, and had been utterly without work for six several periods, of from five to nine weeks each, during the four years of his married life,—the following hasty sketch of the picture which this "home of an Englishman" presented one noon, when a stranger knocked at the door, and it was opened by Seth himself, will scarcely be thought overdrawn:—

Except a grey deal table, there was not a single article within the walls which could be called "furniture," by the least propriety of language. This stood at the farther side of the room, and held a few soiled books and papers, Seth's torn and embrowned hat, and the mother's tattered straw bonnet. The mother sat on a three-legged stool, beside an osier cradle, and was suckling her youngest child while she was eating potatoes and salt from an earthen dish upon her knee. Seth's dish of the same food stood on a seat formed of a board nailed roughly across the frame of a broken chair; while, in the centre of the floor, where the broken bricks had disappeared and left the earth bare, the three elder babes sat squatted round a board whereon boiled potatoes in their skins were piled,—a meal they were devouring greedily, squeezing the inside of the root into their mouths with their tiny hands, after the mode said to be practised in an Irish cabin. An empty iron pot stood near the low expiring fire, and three rude logs of wood lay near it,—the children's usual seats when they had partaken their meal. A description of the children's filthy and bedaubed appearance with the potatoe starch, and of the "looped and windowed" rags that formed their covering, could only produce pain to the reader. Seth's clothing was not much superior to that of his offspring; but the clean cap and coloured cotton handkerchief of the mother, with her own really beautiful but delicate face and form, gave some relief to the melancholy picture.

Seth blushed, as he took up his dish of potatoes, and offered the stranger his fragment of a seat. And the stranger blushed, too, but refused the seat with a look of so much benevolence that Seth's heart glowed to behold it; and his wife set down her porringer, and hushed the children that the stranger might deliver his errand with the greater ease.

"Your name is Thompson, I understand," said the stranger; "pray, do you know what was your mother's maiden name?"

"Greenwood,—Martha Greenwood was my poor mother's maiden name, sir," replied Seth, with the tears starting to his eyes.

The stranger seemed to have some difficulty in restraining similar feelings; and gazed, sadly, round upon the room and its squalid appearance, for a few moments, in silence.