“Well, it is the ‘march of the times.’ It will go on, I suppose, as in other quiet pleasant English towns, until all the sweet Calder valley is swallowed up in the smoke of Tophet. They will cut the snowdrop wood down, and cover Heath Common with cheap villas, and make the old hall into an ‘institution.’ You know how it will be. A river black with filth and stagnant with foulness, a wilderness of toiling suburbs such as you saw at Bradford; and where the cowslips and the corn grew, the earth will be thick with ‘institutions.’ There will be a Blind Institution, and an Eye and Ear Institution, an Orthopædic Institution, and a Magdalen Institution, and Mechanics’ Institutions; and we shall hear a great deal of the liberality and beneficence of the cotton and iron kings of the place. But will all this compensate one little child for robbing it of its God-given birthright of earth and sky? “I cannot believe it. “Poor little martyrs! There will be no ‘swallow twittering from the straw-built shed’ for them,—only the American Devil calling father to his hot, hard day’s labour. What can they make of it all? What kind of outlook will they have in coming years from the bridge of my early recollections? What I saw on the Medlock yesterday—such a hideous sight!—yet my husband remembers catching fish there. The gases would kill a fish like a lightning-stroke, now. “And the poor children! It makes me so sad, having some of my own, to think of those who will be born there, with hearts as hungry for nature and truth as mine was; who will never see God’s heaven, save through grimy panes and smoke; who will have no sweet cowslip-fields to walk in,—only the defiled pavement; who will grow hard and sour before childhood is over, with the riddle of their joyless lives. “How I have drifted on. “Your allusion to Wakefield Bridge in the Fors of February (?) unloosed a flood of long-buried recollections. “This is what you draw on yourself by opening your heart to others. Pray forgive the trespass on your time. “Yours gratefully, “E. L.” NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. The following two paragraphs have been sent me by correspondents, from country papers. I do not answer for the facts stated in them; but however mythic either may be, they form part of the current history of the day, and are worth preserving; the latter especially in illustration of what I meant by the phrase “roseate repose of domestic felicity,” in the Fors of July, this year, p. 184. One of the pamphlets written by John Hopper will become a subject of inquiry in a future Fors.