to remove the timidity with which my sudden appearance seemed to inspire him, by a pleasant word or two of greeting, his flesh felt case-hardened into all the induration of toiling manhood, and as unsusceptible of growth as his anvil block. Fixed manhood had set in upon him in the greenness of his youth; and there he was, by his father's side, a stinted, premature man; with his childhood cut off; with no space to grow in between the cradle and the anvil block; chased, as soon as he could stand on his little legs, from the hearth-stone to the forge stone, by iron necessity, that would not let him stop long enough to pick up a letter of the English alphabet on the way. O, Lord John Russell! think of it! Of this Englishman's son, placed by his mother, scarcely weaned, on a high, cold stone, barefooted, before the anvil; there to harden, sear, and blister its young hands by heating and hammering ragged nailrods, for the sustenance her breasts can no longer supply! Lord John! look at those nails, as they lie hissing on the block. Know you their meaning, use, and language? Please your lordship, let me tell you—I have made nails many a day and many a night-they are iron exclamation points,* which this unlettered, dwarfed boy is unconsciously arraying against you, against the British government, and the government of British literature, for cutting him off without a letter of the English alphabet, when printing is done by steam! For incarcerating him, for no sin on his or his parent's side, but poverty, into a dark, six-by-eight prison of hard labour, a youthless being-think of it!-an infant hardened, almost in its mother's arms, into a man, by toils that bow the sturdiest of the world's labourers, who come to manhood through intervening years of childhood! "The boy's father was at work with his back toward me, when I entered. At my first word of salutation *Things like this (!) to the lad, he turned round and accosted me a little bashfully, as if unaccustomed to the sight of strangers in that place, or reluctant to let them into the scene and secret of his property. I sat down upon one end of his nail bench, and told him I was an American blacksmith by trade, and that I had come in to see how he got on in the world, whether he was earning pretty good wages at his business, so that he could live comfortably, and send his children to school. As I said this, I glanced inquiringly toward the boy, who was looking steadily at me from his stone stool by the anvil. Two or three little crock-faced girls, from two to five years of age, had stole in timidly, and a couple of young frightened eyes were peering over the doorsill at me. The poor Englishman-he was as much an Englishman as the Duke of Wellington*-looked at his bushy-headed, bare-footed children, and said softly, with a melancholy shake of the head, that the times were rather hard with him. It troubled his heart, and many hours of the night he had been kept awake by the thought of it, that he could not send his children to school, nor teach them himself to read. They were good children, he said, with a moist yearning in his eyes; they were all the wealth he had, and he loved them the more, the harder he had to work for them. The poorest part of the poverty that was on him, was that he could not give his children the letters. They were good children, for all that the crock in the shop was in their faces, and their fingers were bent like eagle's claws with handling nails. He had been a poor man all his days, and he knew his children would be poor all their days, and poorer than he, if the nail business should continue to grow worse. If he could only give them the letters, it would make them the like of rich; for then they could read the Testament. He could read the Testament a little, for he had learned the letters by forge-light. It was a good *The Duke is an Irishman! But let that pass. book, was the Testament; and he was sure it was made for nailers and such like. It helped him wonderfully when the loaf was small on his table. He had but little time to read it when the sun was up, and it took him long to read a little, for he learned the letters when he was old. But he laid it beside his dish at dinner time and fed his heart with it, while his children were eating the bread that fell to his share. And when he had spelt out a line of the shortest words, he read them aloud, and his eldest boy, the one on the block there, could say several whole verses he had learned in this way. It was a great comfort to him to think that James could take into his heart so many verses of the Testament which he could not read. He intended to teach all his children in this way. It was all he could do for them; and this he had to do at meal times; for all the other hours he had to be at the anvil. The nailing business was growing harder, he was growing old, and his family large. He had to work from four o'clock in the morning till ten o'clock at night to earn eighteenpence. His wages averaged only about seven shillings a week; and there were five of them in the family to live on what they could earn. It was hard to make up the loss of an hour. Not one of their hands, however little, could be spared. Jemmy was going on nine years of age, and a helpful lad he was; and the poor man looked at him dotingly. Jemmy could work off a thousand nails a day, of the smallest size. The rent of their little shop, tenement, and garden, was five pounds a year; and a few pennies earned by the youngest of them was of great account. "But, continued the father, speaking cheerily, I am not the one that ought to complain. Many is the man that has a harder lot of it than I, among the nailers along these hills and in the valley. My neighbour in the next door could tell you something about labour you may never have heard the like of in your country. He is an older man than I, and there are seven of them in his family; and, for all that, he has no boy like Jemmy here to help him. Some of his little girls are sickly, and their mother is not over strong, and it all comes on him. He is an oldish man, as I was saying, yet he not only works eighteen hours every day at his forge, but every Friday in the year he works all night long, and never lays off his clothes till late of Saturday night." Again we say this is a sad tale for an American to tell of an Englishman and his family! A SABBATH SCHOOL IN THE WOODS. AN American Missionary, when addressing a large number of Sabbath School children in New York, said "Children, shall I tell you a story about a Sabbath School I met with last summer? I was travelling in the Eastern Province of Canada, and in the course of my tour, I went up the Ottawa river some hundred miles. There the country is settled almost entirely by Roman Catholics. There are only a few Protestants. Nearly all the people worship the Virgin Mary, and pray to the saints, and kneel before images. Well, there were some good men who thought they would have a place where they might enjoy public worship as we do here in New York. So they came together for more than thirty miles around, and determined that they would send to Montreal or somewhere else, and see if they could not get a minister to come up there and preach to them. They were generally poor, and could not promise much support to a minister; but some of them were rich in faith, and were willing to do what they could. They did send for a missionary, and one came. In a little while the people built a rude house for him, and by and by they built a place of worship, though it was not so fine a building as the one you worship in. It was small, and rough built, but it was as good as they could afford. When I was there, I went to the place where they held their Sabbath School. It was on a week day, and I saw a sight which interested me a good deal. There was one good man that loved religion and Sabbath Schools, but he was very poor. All the property he had was a poor hovel of a house, and some woodland. Wood is very plentiful in that part of Canada. The most expense there is about it, is in cutting it, and drawing it to the place where it is wanted to burn. This good man could not do anything else to support the church and the Sabbath School; so he agreed to furnish all the wood that was needed in the winter. He and his boys, at the time I visited this place, were cutting wood in the forest, and bringing it on their shoulders to the little place of worship, and the building that was occupied as a Sabbath School. He had no cart or oxen. So he and his boys had to carry the logs of wood in this way. I could not help wishing, as I saw this interesting sight, that all the little children in Sabbath Schools more favoured, might be there, and learn a lesson from the poor man and his children. I thought if they had been there, they would have felt they could all do something for those who have no places of worship, no Sabbath Schools, and no bibles. Now, however, these children may sing "Once rude and ignorant we were, Our Sabbaths once in vain were spent, But now the house of prayer frequent, Jesus invites young children near, |