Reader! the conversation shall not be prolonged, lest the object of this sketch should be mistaken. These conversations are _real_: they are no coinages. Go to Leicester, or any other of the suffering towns of depressed manufacture, where men compete with each other in machinery till human hands are of little use, and rival each other in wicked zeal to reduce man to the merest minimum of subsistence. If the missionary people—and this is not said with a view to question the true greatness and utility of their efforts—if they would be consistent, let them send their heralds into the manufacturing districts, and first convert the "infidels" there, ere they send their expensive messengers to India. But let it be understood that the heralds must be furnished with brains, as well as tongues; for whoever enters Leicester, or any other of the populous starving hives of England, must expect to find the deepest subjects of theology, and government, and political economy, taken up with a subtlety that would often puzzle a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. Whoever supposes the starving "manufacturing masses" know no more, and can use no better language, than the peasantry in the agricultural counties, will find himself egregiously mistaken. 'Tis ten to one but he will learn more of a profound subject in one hour's conversation of starving stockingers than he would do in ten lectures of a university professor. Let the missionary people try these quarters, then; but let their heralds "know their business" ere they go, or they will make as slow progress as Egede and the Moravians among the Greenlanders. One hint may be given. Let them begin with the manufacturers; and, if they succeed in making _real_ converts to Christianity in that quarter, their success will be tolerably certain among the working-men, and tolerably easy in its achievement. There is no "tale" to finish about John or his lad, or Jem and his wife. They went on starving,—begging,—receiving threats of imprisonment,—tried the "Bastile" for a few weeks,—came out and had a little work,—starved again; and they are still going the same miserable round, like thousands in "merrie England." What are your thoughts, reader? SETH THOMPSON, THE STOCKINGER; OR, "WHEN THINGS ARE AT THE WORST, THEY BEGIN TO MEND." Leicestershire stockingers call that a false proverb. "People have said so all our lives," say they; "but, although we have each and all agreed, every day, that things were at the worst, they never begun to mend yet!" This was not their language sixty years ago, but it is their daily language _now_; and the story that follows is but, as it were, of yesterday.