The other day I saw the photograph of a child, supposed to be a city waif. She was bare-footed and bare-armed, with a rent in her _pinafore_--a city waif with a pinafore! The photographer had studied his lines, and posed his model according to the rules he had learnt; everything was in its right place about that picture, but, like the mountains about Borrowdale, just a little too exactly as they ought to be. He had taken the trouble of dirtying the hands and face and legs, but I saw at a glance that, although it was all right according to art, it was not all right according to nature. She was not a real city waif, and to me, who had seen the real article, very far from it. In Edinburgh, one winter morning, I saw a picture that needed no adjusting, only the camera, to render it immortal--a man out of work, saying good-bye to his wife and child before he went on the tramp. Where the Old Cross of Edinburgh used to stand (before the new malformation was put up), at its base in the High Street they stood--that group of two, with the speck of humanity in her arms; the man, in shirt sleeves, leaning against the railings, snow-laden, with his shoeless feet blue-black against the mud-coloured snow on the pavement. In his left hand he held a very small bundle, roughly bound in a red spotted rag of a handkerchief, while with the tattered sleeves of his dirty shirt he was attempting to wipe the eyes of the child, that poor little pinched and smeared-faced baby, who was crying with hunger and cold. The mother who held it in her thin arms had turned her face from her husband to where I could see it as I passed by. She was oblivious to spectators in the silent abandonment of her own woe. A wisp of fair hair fell down from the old bashed hat upon her head, and hung against her clay-coloured cheek. Two tears, half congealed, lay just above the quivering lips. But there were no words of parting passing between those two.