Reader, the boy had a home; I saw it; a cellar, whose bare walls and brick-uncovered floor bespoke it the abode of poverty and misery. He was not an orphan; for on a heap of rags, which served her for a bed, I saw an emaciated figure which he called his mother; a brother and a sister, too, were there, younger than my guide, and in their tattered, dirty garments scarcely distinguishable from the bed of rags on which they were huddled beside the dying woman. He was not an orphan; the young street-wanderer had a father. Him, too, I saw; a rude, blear-eyed drunkard, whose countenance it was fearful to look upon; for there might be seen that the worst passions of our common nature had with him obtained a perilous ascendency--a brute, whose intellect, perhaps never bright, had become more brutal under the influence of the fire-spirit, to which he bore conspicuous marks of being a groveling soul-and-body slave. To me he appeared like the demon Ruin midst the wreck around. On him, now that the wife could work no more, were they dependent. Need I say that there were days when they scarce tasted food, when the young wanderer had been unsuccessful in the streets? and when hungry, tired, and dejected, he gave current to his grief, as when I found him in the midst of his heart-breaking sorrow? Yes, my first surmise was painfully correct. He had, indeed, commenced life's warfare for himself; young as he was, it was his fate to battle his way on the path of life, and not a soul to advise and guard him against the demon Crime, whose favorite haunts are the footsteps of the ignorant and needy. Reader, how many of the victims of crime who fill our prisons, were their histories known, would prove to have commenced life like this boy! Not always, then, let us unpitying behold the criminal, who, in his early manhood or the prime of life, is banished from his country, or suffers the dread penalty of death, without reflecting how much those who brought him into the world were concerned with so melancholy an issue--without reflecting that, like the little fellow of whom these pages tell, he may have had a father little better than the brute of the field, and in his childish years have been turned out to get his bread--a wanderer in the streets. THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^S. MORE. LIBELLUS A MARGARETA MORE, QUINDECIM ANNOS NATA, CHELSEIÆ INCEPTVS. * * * * * "Nulla dies sine linea." * * * * * CHELSEA, _June 18_.