“the girl” is despatched with many threats to the nearest places where bread and cheese and porter can be procured, and charged at the same time to get “two penn’orth of gin,” to give to the baby to make it sleep. This expensive food consumes the greater part of the half-crown. Three pennyworth of bread, two pennyworth of vegetables, two pennyworth of barley or rice, and four pennyworth of meat _well cooked_ would have supplied all the family with a good nourishing supper, leaving something for the mid-day meal of the morrow; but there has been no one at home to cook, and in their excited and miserable state it is not food they care for, so much as something that will dim the perception of their extreme wretchedness—anything that will make them sleep and forget. So they drink the porter, and the baby has the gin, and, in spite of the moan of the scalded child, they sleep; but in such an atmosphere, surrounded with such dirt within and stench without, that should they all awake with burning fever the next morning, no one can wonder. They tell me that, on the mornings after such nights, they suffer from intense depression, so much so, that whatever remains of the half-crown is spent on drink, in order to drag themselves up to a repetition of their daily toil. Now, the earnings of the family just described (for I have drawn a picture from real life) averaged for five months in the summer £2, 10s. per week. They could, of course, have lived very well upon twenty-five shillings. If we reckon ten shillings for paying off old scores, buying new clothes, furniture, and sundries, there would still be fifteen shillings left, which might have been put into the Savings’ Bank to meet the demands of the ensuing winter. But instead of doing this, the man in his distress confessed to me, that the cost of what he and his wife drank each week of their prosperity would amount to at least a pound. The usual quantity of beer that a brickmaker takes during the hours of work is seven pints. This expenditure is looked upon simply as necessary: and when money is plentiful, there must be the drinking for luxury as well as necessity. The only excuse which can be made for this recklessness is that the toil of the brickmaker is excessive. In the summer, he is expected to work from four or five o’clock in the morning till eight o’clock in the evening. This pressure of work necessitates the drying of sand on Sunday for the next week’s work. The Sabbath is no day of rest to him. He is expected even on that day, and during his short night, to be watchful over the bricks, and cover them up on the approach of rain. Should he oversleep himself, (which is at least possible after such a day’s work,) or be away at a place of worship on a Sunday, and the bricks in the meantime be injured by wet, he would lose some part of his wages, of which a portion is always kept back by the master.