exions. They have been "dragged"[4] up. As an
infant, "it was never sung to: no one ever told it a tale of the
nursery. It was dragged up, to live or die, as it happened. It had no
young dreams: it broke at once into the iron realities of life. The
child exists not for the very poor as any object of dalliance; it is
only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes
inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for
food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace;
it never makes him young again, with recalling his young times. The
children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart
bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her
little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather
above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of
toys, of nursery-books, of summer holidays, (fitting that age); of the
promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of
mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The
questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity
in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has
come to be a woman before it was a child. It has learned to go to
market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing,
acute, sharpened: it never prattles." Such was the child. The passage
from the single to the married state, which generally changes the course
of woman's life, has to her been nothing more than a brief interval of
pleasure. She soon joins the bands of the busy daughters of care. So the
loss of her husband has been to her but a tragedy. The last act is over;
the curtain has fallen: she is now in the outer world again; she is
oppressed by sadness, vague and undefinable; but the noise and bustle
around her, the tumult of her own thoughts, and her continued labour,
afford that alleviation which the solitary and the unemployed seek for
in vain. Those who would step in and, relieve her of her toil, may be
well-meaning persons; but, they are interfering in matters they do not
understand. They would spend their money more beneficially, and with
greater regard to the principles of Christian charity, if each would
take care that those who do for him any kind of labour, receive an
adequate remuneration. It may be a politico-economic law, that we buy in
the cheapest market, and sell in