soil. In wet weather, green and filthy slime
covers the ground in many a wretched street.

We shall not dwell at length on the domestic
miseries we saw; skeleton limbs faintly
recovering from the starvation of winter; bare
rooms; rags that now cover what was, two
or three months back, often utter nakedness.
There, in the bitter winter days, the wife of
an honest and industrious bricklayer, whose
work was gone from him, turned garment after
garment into food, and lay at last, with three
naked children about her, on the bare boards
of the floor, and so brought into the world a
little baby which there were no means at all
of dressing. To that family, of course, the
minister's wife took a woman's succour.
Now, it is in the workhouse; but what workhouse
is to hold the sufferers when they are,
not families, but whole districts—towns within
the town—that pine for want?

An Irishman and Irishwoman who had been
helped in sore need during the winter, were,
after the custom of their country, loud in
obtrusive thanks and adoration of their helper.
A sick Englishwoman, whose suffering had
been yet greater, and whose gratitude for help
was at least as deep, had little indeed to say;
and a poor woman who, living in the same room,
was her nurse, and the faithful companion of
her sorrow, while scraping the pennyworth of
coarse fish that was the dinner of the sick-
room, had no better acknowledgment of
help to give, than a softened tone, and the
twinkle of an unacknowledged tear that
trembled among her eyelashes. That reticence
belongs to the English character; it gives
to poverty—often and often—dignity and
pathos; but it increases risk by neglect for the
sorrow that it hides. It chanced that within
a few hours we saw two ends of the social
scale, passing from Kent Street to the Opera.
There the luxurious and wealthy enjoyed the
harmonious agonies of an imaginary sorrow,
set forth in costly dresses and the cleanest
linen. Could the curtain but have risen upon
Sweeps' Alley or Falstaff's Yard, and could the
low voice of some hunger-wasted woman have
been heard murmuring to that bright audience
the secrets buried in her heart, there would
have been as much of honest feeling stirred as
ever was stirred by an eminent soprano of
refined sensibility. But, that voice does not
reach ears and hearts that would be freely
open to its cry. The reserve natural to our
race makes quiet poor who do not
importune,—do not search actively for helpers;
it makes also quiet rich, who do not urgently
invite, who do not actively make search for,
those who need their help. There is in these
days, as a diffused feeling, no ill will, no fear,
no jealousy, between rich and poor. The rich,
when they are told where they can make a
kind and wise use of their means, are, we
believe, more generous in England than in
any land under the sun. But we all of us,
great and small, need too much prompting;
too few of us make active search for means
of usefulness that lie beside the beaten
highway of our lives.

Next to the foulness of the air in the district
of Saint Stephen's, Kent Street, and the
general squalor, nothing perhaps is so
noticeable to an outside observer as the
number and beauty of the children. We saw
them in groups of eight or ten at a door,
happy as it is hard for any child to learn how
not to be; fair, plump, and bright-eyed.
Where the rate of mortality is high, births
are the more numerous. That which destroys,
appears to stimulate production. Was
it the Will of God, when He sent, as a bar
and warning against many social errors, the
disease that kills among us tens of thousands
of young people year by year, was it
His will that the children doomed to early
death should be so fair, that they may the
more surely root a love in old and stubborn
hearts, which must grow Heavenward when
the lost innocent are taken to His bosom?

The ragged little ones cannot be taught in
St. Stephen's, Kent Street. With difficulty,
the incumbent obtained, soon after his
entrance on the district, a building suited for
use as a Ragged and Industrial School. The
place was fitted for its new purpose; a hundred
pounds were spent on it, and a ragged
school was maintained for several years. It
was attached to an old inn; was claimed by
the owner of the inn, whose property was
subject to a suit in chancery. At a week's
notice, the ragged school was ejected, and the
very door of it bricked up. There is no
other building to be had; but there is a
morsel of spare ground upon which it will be
safe to plant one of the portable school-
rooms that are to be purchased of the
ironmonger; and to assist in raising means for
the purchase of this iron school-room, the
minister and his wife are at this time
proposing to hold somewhere, a bazaar.
Whoever, as to this or any other matter, wishes
to know more of the Kent Street poor than
we can tell, or to do more than we can ask,
should write to the incumbent, the Reverend
I. H. Simpson, whose address is, Seventy-
four, Virginia Terrace, Dover Road. That
there is no lack of ragged children, we can
testify. In one court, we observed the house
of a dealer in clothes. It was a two-roomed
house, and there hung outside its door two
bundles of such rags as might have been
thrown away by the beggars of more favoured
parts.

But there is a national school—so called,
we presume, from being wholly unaided
by the nation—attached to St. Stephen's
church. We saw girls and boys in it who
were not only well-taught, but clean. With
the girls' school was combined the infant
school. The little folk sat step above step;
on the lowest step, young prattlers with the
round plump cheeks of infancy; and at the
word of the schoolmistress they sang their
simple songs, and showed how carefully they