government of British literature, for cutting him
off without a letter of the English alphabet, when printing is done by
steam; for incarcerating him for no sin on his parents' side, but
poverty, in a dark, six-by-eight prison of hard labor, a _youthless_
being--think of it!--an infant hardened, almost in its mother's arms,
into a man, by toil that bows the sturdiest of the world's laborers who
come to manhood through the intervening years of childhood!

The boy's father was at work with his back toward me, when I entered. At
my first word of salutation to the lad, he turned around and accosted me
a little bashfully, as if unaccustomed to the sight of strangers in that
place, or reluctant to let them into the scene and secret of his
poverty. I sat down upon one end of his nail-bench, and told him I was
an American blacksmith by trade, and that I had come in to see how he
got on in the world; whether he was earning pretty good wages at his
business, so that he could live comfortably, and send his children to
school. As I said this, I glanced inquiringly toward the boy, who was
looking steadily at me from his stone stool by the anvil. Two or three
little crock-faced girls, from two to five years of age, had stolen in
timidly, and a couple of young, frightened eyes were peering over the
door-sill at me. The poor Englishman--he was as much an Englishman as
the Duke of Wellington--looked at his bushy-headed, barefooted children,
and said softly, with a melancholy shake of the head, that the times
were rather hard with him. It troubled his heart, and many hours of the
night he had been kept awake by the thought of it, that he could not
send his children to school, nor teach them himself to read. They were
good children, he said, with a moist yearning in his eyes; they were all
the wealth he had, and he loved them the more, the harder he had to work
for them. The poorest part of the poverty that was on him, was that he
could not give his children the letters. They were good children, for
all the crock of the shop was on their faces, and their fingers were
bent like eagle's claws with handling nails. He had been a poor man all
his days, and he knew his children would be poor all their days, and
poorer than he, if the nail business should continue to grow worse. If
he could only give them the letters, it would make them the like of
rich; for then they could read the Testament. He could read the
Testament a little, for he had lea