engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation.  It never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant.  It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance to divert the child; the prattled nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passion of young wonder.  It was never sung to—­no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery.  It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened.  It had no young dreams.  It broke at once into the iron realities of life.  A child exists not for the very poor as any object of dalliance; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour.  It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for food with the parent.  It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace; it never makes him young again, with recalling his young times.  The children of the very poor have no young times.  It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating.  It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school.  It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes.  The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence.  It has come to be a woman, before it was a child.  It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles.  Had we not reason to say, that the home of the very poor is no home?

There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one.  It has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside conveniences, of which the poor dream not.  But with all this, it is no home.  It is—­the house of the man that is infested with many visiters.  May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof!  It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; droppers in, as they are called.  We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall.  It is the very error of the position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium—­a plaguy suburban mid-space—­fitted to catch idlers from town or country.  We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way.  We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences.  At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep.