tion. The hot street reeks
with pungent odours, the faint airs that wander in the scorching alleys
at noonday strike on the fevered face like wafts from some furnace, and
the cruel nights are hard to endure save when a cool shower has fallen.
If you wander in London byways, you find that the people are fairly
driven from their houses after a blistering summer day, and they sit in
the streets till early morning. They are not at all depressed; on the
contrary, the dark hours are passed in reckless merriment, and I have
often known the men to rest quite contentedly on the pavement till the
dawn came and the time of departure for labour was near. Even the young
children remain out of doors, and their shrill treble mingles with the
coarse rattle of noisy choruses. Some of those cheery youngsters have
an outing in the hopping season, and they come back bronzed and healthy;
but most of them have to be satisfied with one day at the most amid the
fields and trees. I have spoken of London; but the case of those who
dwell in the black manufacturing cities is even worse. What is Oldham
like on a blistering midsummer day? What are Hanley and St. Helen's and
the lower parts of Manchester like? The air is charged with dust, and
the acrid, rasping fumes from the chimneys seem to acquire a malignant
power over men and brain. Toil goes steadily on, and the working-folk
certainly have the advantage of starting in the bright morning hours,
before the air has become befouled; but, as the sun gains strength, and
the close air of the unlovely streets is heated, then the torment to be
endured is severe. In Oldham and many other Lancashire towns a most
admirable custom prevails. Large numbers of people club their money
during the year and establish a holiday-fund; they migrate wholesale in
the summertime, and have a merry holiday far away from the crush of the
pavements and the dreary lines of ugly houses. A wise and beneficent
custom is this, and the man who first devised it deserves a monument. I
congratulate the troops of toilers who share my own pleasure; but, alas,
how many honest folk in those awful Midland places will pant and sweat
and suffer amid grime and heat while the glad months are passing! Good
men who might be happy even in the free spaces of the Far West, fair
women who need only rest and pure air to enable them to bloom in beauty,
little children who peak and pine, are all crammed within the odious
precincts of the towns which C