starving to death is hard work. What will winter bring to them when
severe weather begins to tell upon constitutions lowered in tone by
a starvation diet--a diet so different to what they have been used
to when in work? What will the 1s. 6d. a-head weekly do for them in
that hard time? If something more than this is not done for them,
when more food, clothing, and fire are necessary to everybody,
calamities may arise which will cost England a hundred times more
than a sufficient relief--a relief worthy of those who are
suffering, and of the nation they belong to--would have cost. In the
meantime the cold wings of winter already begin to overshadow the
land; and every day lost involves the lives, or the future
usefulness, of thousands of our best population.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WANDERING MINSTRELS; OR, WAILS OF THE WORKLESS POOR.

"For whom the heart of man shuts out,
Straightway the heart of God takes in,
And fences them all round about
With silence, 'mid the world's loud din.
And one of his great charities
Is music; and it doth not scorn
To close the lids upon the eyes
Of the weary and forlorn."
--JAMES RUSSEL LOWELL.

There is one feature of the distress in Lancashire which was seen
strikingly upon the streets of our large towns during some months of
1862. I allude to the wandering minstrelsy of the unemployed. Swarms
of strange, shy, sad-looking singers and instrumental performers, in
the work-worn clothing of factory operatives, went about the busy
city, pleading for help in touching wails of simple song--like so
many wild birds driven by hard weather to the haunts of man. There
is something instructive, as well as affecting, in this feature of
the troubled time. These wanderers are only a kind of representative
overflow of a vast number whom our streets will never see. Any one
well acquainted with Lancashire, will know how widespread the study
of music is among its working population. Even the inhabitants of
our large towns know something more about this now than they knew a
few months ago. I believe there is no part of England in which the
practice of sacred music is so widely and lovingly pursued amongst
the working people as in the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
There is no part of England where, until lately, there have been so
many poor men's pianos, which have been purchased by a long course
of careful savings from the workman's wages. These, of course, have
mostly been sold during the h