Now windows, which have been closed throughout the long winter, are again thrown open, and the pleasant breeze which has come from "far away o'er the sea," again blows freshly into those close and unhealthy-smelling rooms. Over dead walls and high houses has the refreshing air climbed--escaping from courts in which there was no thoroughfare. Through the steam of suffocating sewers it struggled; it shook off the malaria that clung to its skirts, as it swept over dark and stagnant ditches; over bone-boiling houses it hurried, and left the old poison behind to float around the places where it was first engendered; and, though somewhat shorn of its sweetness and its strength, it comes like a welcome guest in at the open doors and uplifted casements of the poor. By it the grey hairs of that thin, pale-faced old man are uplifted; it tosses aside the long brown locks of the little grandchild that stands between his knees, fatherless and motherless; for the wind an hour ago blew over the empty house beside the black putrid ditch, where so many died during the past summer, and where that little orphan then lived. Even the imprisoned lark that hangs by the window feels his plumes ruffled by the breeze, and fancying for a moment that he is free, sends out his voice through the wiry cage, and sings as if he were again shivering his wings in some silvery cloud high above the opening daisies. The blessed breeze and the sweet sunshine have aroused the poor children who vegetate in courts and alleys; and these dirty images of innocence have descended from the close, high attics, and climbed out of the low, damp cellars, and now, bare-headed and barefooted and scantily clad, they are chasing each other like swallows, and appear as happy as if neither rags nor hunger existed in this great city of palaces, poor-houses, and prisons. A drum battledore with its gilded shuttlecock they never saw, nor would such things make them happier than those they have manufactured out of the corks they picked up among the sweepings of the gin-shop, and the feathers from the stall of a distant poulterer; while the bottom of a saucepan, or the crown of a hat, even the fire-shovel (if nothing else is to be had) furnish them with battledores. Somewhere those little ones have been and thrust their tiny arms through the railings where a lilac-tree was in leaf, and they have dug up the stones in the court, and stuck the green lilac-twigs in the ground, and made themselves a garden, which they are watering out of oyster-shells and broken bits of pots; for the same instinct that leads a bird to build its nest causes them to imitate the making of gardens. They collect the leaves of the turnip-tops which the greengrocer has thrown into the street, and, placing them on their little bare heads, march up and down the court, crying "All a-blowing! all a-growing!"