The morsel of burnt child, lying in another room, so patiently, in bed, wrapped in lint, and looking stedfastly at us with his bright quiet eyes when we spoke to him kindly, looked as if the knowledge of these things, and of all the tender things there are to think about, might have been in his mind—as if he thought, with us, that there was a fellow-feeling in the pauper nurses which appeared to make them more kind to their charges than the race of common nurses in the hospitals—as if he mused upon the Future of some older children lying around him in the same place, and thought it best, perhaps, all things considered, that he should die—as if he knew, without fear, of those many coffins, made and unmade, piled up in the store below—and of his unknown friend, “the dropped child,” calm upon the box-lid covered with a cloth. But there was something wistful and appealing, too, in his tiny face, as if, in the midst of all the hard necessities and incongruities he pondered on, he pleaded, in behalf of the helpless and the aged poor, for a little more liberty—and a little more bread. THE “IRISH DIFFICULTY” SOLVED BY CON Mc Nale. Con Mc Nale would have been summarily repudiated as an Irishman by our farce-writers and slashing novelists. He neither drank, fought, nor swore; did not make many blunders; and never addressed a friend either as his ‘honey’ or his ‘jewel.’ His _cotamore_ was of stout frieze, and though Con had long attained his full height, the tailor had left him room to grow. The _caubeen_ was not his head-dress, for Con had arrived at the dignity of a silk hat, which had been manufactured, as the mark in the crown declared, by the Saxons in the Borough of Southwark, which locality Con believed to be in the n_a_ighbourhood of England. The brogues were also absent, but were favourably represented by shoes of native manufacture laced with stout thongs. In fact, Mr. Mc Nale was a fine specimen of the finest _pisantry_ in the world—without the rags.