life."

"At the Traffords'," said Caroline, "the greatest fun we ever had was a
singing class."

"I pity them poor devils in the country," said Mick; "we got some
of them at Collinson's--come from Suffolk they say; what they call
hagricultural labourers, a very queer lot, indeed."

"Ah! them's the himmigrants," said Caroline; "they're sold out of
slavery, and sent down by Pickford's van into the labour market to bring
down our wages."

"We'll teach them a trick or two before they do that," urged Mick.
"Where are you, Miss Harriet?"

"I'm at Wiggins and Webster's, sir."

"Where they clean machinery during meal-time; that won't do," said Mick.
"I see one of your partners coming in," said Mick, making many signals
to a person who very soon joined them. "Well, Devilsdust, how are you?"

This was the familiar appellation of a young gentleman, who really had
no other, baptismal or patrimonial. About a fortnight after his mother
had introduced him into the world, she returned to her factory and put
her infant out to nurse, that is to say, paid threepence a week to an
old woman who takes charge of these new-born babes for the day, and
gives them back at night to their mothers as they hurriedly return from
the scene of their labour to the dungeon or the den, which is still by
courtesy called "home." The expense is not great: laudanum and treacle,
administered in the shape of some popular elixir, affords these
innocents a brief taste of the sweets of existence, and keeping
them quiet, prepares them for the silence of their impending grave.
Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it
is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently has not
yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts. But the vital principle is an impulse from an
immortal artist, and sometimes baffles, even in its tenderest phasis,
the machinations of society for its extinction. There are infants
that will defy even starvation and poison, unnatural mothers and demon
nurses. Such was the nameless one of whom we speak. We cannot say he
thrived; but he would not die. So at two years of age, his mother being
lost sight of, and the weekly payment having ceased, he was sent out
in the street to "play," in order to be run over. Even this expedient
failed. The youngest and the feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut
spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed o