But look at these unfortunates--the infant serfs of a neglected rural district! Look at them physiologically--observe their lank, colorless hair, screening the sunken eye, and trailing upon the bony neck; look at the hollow cheeks, the candle-like arms, and the unmuscular shanks which serve the young urchins for legs! But are not these children breathing a pure atmosphere? Are they not Nature's own? Yes; but there is one thing wanting to them--one ominous word clears up the mystery. Starvation! Not, indeed, such starvation as brings the sorrows of a sad lot to a speedy end; but such as drags its pining sufferings out, through the overshadowed years of childhood and youth; through those spasmodic years of manhood during which the struggle to exist wears an aspect of rugged rigor; and then through that residue of early decrepitude, haggard, bent, idiot-like, which is indeed an unblessed end of an unblessed existence. This rural population does pretty well if the father be able-bodied and sober, and the mother managing, through the summer season, of wheat-hoeing, hay-making, and wheat harvest; that is to say, when the labor of the mother and her children comes in to swell a little the weekly wages. During these weeks something of needed clothing is obtained, rent is paid up, and a pittance of animal food, weekly, is added to the bread, and the tea, and the potato of the seven months' diet. It would be doing a wrong to our worthy farmer friends, and to the rural sporting gentry, to affirm that these miserables are actually dying of want. No, they are not dying, so as inquests must be held before they may be buried--would to God they were--they are the living--they are living to show what extremities men, women and children may endure, and yet not die; or what they hold to be worse, not to betake themselves to "the union!" But how do these same men, women and children pass five months of the year? Gladly would one find them curled round like hedgehogs, and hybernating in hollow trees; in rabbit burrows, lost to consciousness. We should, indeed, count it a miracle if, on a May morning, we were to see a group of human beings start up alive from the sward, along with the paiglus and the cowslips. But it is much less than a miracle to see the people of a depressed rural district stepping alive out of the winter months!