d for by the antagonisms with which the child has had to
contend, and the devices which have been inspired by the sheer pressure
of want. He has been pitched into the sea of events to sink or swim, and
those sharpened faculties are the tentacles put forth by an effort of
nature in order to secure a hold of life. And there is something very
sad and very fearful in this precocity. The vagrant boy has known
nothing of the stages of childhood, conducting with beautiful simplicity
from one timid step to another, and gradually forming it for the
realities of the world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the
premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so
mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on
its worst side--knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its
heartless materialism--knowing it as the man does not know it who has
only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature.
Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy _should_ know so
much; and, without one hour of romance, one step of childish innocence
and imagination, should have gone clear through "the world" which so
many boast that they understand--the knave's world, the libertine's
world, the world of the skeptical, scoffing, Ishmaelitish spirit? And
yet he has so little _real_ knowledge--there is such a cloud of
ignorance and moral stupor resting upon his brain and heart! So much of
him is merely animal, foxy, wolfish, and this sharpened intellect only a
faculty, an instinct, a preternatural organ pushed out to gain
subsistence with. It is a terrible anomaly, and yet, I say, it is none
the less an active power, and shows us that, however neglected, the
child of the abject poor is not dormant or undeveloped. In the first
place, very likely, it has developed itself into a dogged atheism--a
sulky unbelief. The brain of the vagrant boy is active with speculation
as well as with practice--he has some theory of this life in which he
lives, and, as might be expected, a theory woven with the tissues of
his own experience; woven with the shadows and the lurid lights of his
lot. A gentleman passing one day through the streets of Edinboro', saw a
boy, who lived by selling fire-wood, standing with a heavy load upon his
back, looking at a number of boys amusing themselves in a play-ground.
"Sometimes," says the writer, "he laughed aloud, at other times he
looked sad and sorrowful. Steppin