who bring no old memories into the crowded city, in which many of them were born. Home, with all its green boughs rustling above the rippling stream--the murmur of the bee--the shout of the cuckoo, and the mellow song of the golden-billed blackbird, were never to them old familiar sounds; they have nothing to sigh over, to look back upon and regret. The word "Home" to many of them has no charm, has never been surrounded with comfort; it is but a shifting from attic to attic, or from cellar to cellar; it but conjures up unhealthy back-rooms and high dead-walls, and breathless courts, which, when the wind reaches, it only stirs the sleeping poison, and scatters wider the stench of a thousand stagnant sewers. There they sit, in such neighbourhoods as Whitechapel and Bethnal-green, and hear of holidays and merry seasons, in which they have no share. The Christmas bells but ring out to them telling that nights are long and coals dear; and they are compelled to sit and listen to those sounds in the darkness, or by the glimmering of a handful of fire, for they are too poor to purchase even a candle. Spring processions and Whitsun holidays but tell them that there are pleasant places somewhere, which people are rushing out of town to see, though for them the flowers grow not, nor have they ever rested under the cooling shadow of a green tree. All they know of time is by feeling hungry, and struggling against sleep, while "stitch, stiching" for such establishments as Mr. Mayhew has described in his _London Labour and London Poor_, keeping no other record of the hours but by the number of stitches they take, or how long it will be before they can afford to eat again, while hunger is gnawing within, though the insufficient meal is but just concluded. Their homes were places from which they were many a time turned out because they could not pay the rent, then left to stand shivering and starving in the street, until some one, who numbered as many miseries as they, all but the want of a wretched roof for a covering, invited them in--and they sat crouching beside the fireless grate, thankful that, in addition to hunger, they had not to endure "The pitiless pelting of the outer storm."