working there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair toil.  The old man’s eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he went through a coal-district the women standing at their doors would lift up their children to see “Lawyer Roberts” go by, and would bid “God bless him” for what he had done.  This dear old man was my first tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil.  I had taken no interest in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous Whiggism which had always surrounded me.  I regarded “the poor” as folk to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor.  But to Mr. Roberts “the poor” were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a right to self-rule, not to looking after, with a right to justice, not to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me, in season and out of season.  “What do you think of John Bright?” he demanded of me one day.  “I have never thought of him at all,” I answered lightly.  “Isn’t he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making rows?” “There, I thought so,” he broke out fiercely.  “That’s just what they say.  I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man God ever gave to the cause of the poor.”  And then he launched out into stories of John Bright’s work and John Bright’s eloquence, and showed me the changes that work and eloquence had made in the daily lives of the people.

With Mr. Roberts, his wife, and two daughters, I went to Switzerland as the autumn drew near.  It would be of little interest to tell how we went to Chamounix and worshipped Mont Blanc, how we crossed the Mer de Glace and the Mauvais Pas, how we visited the Monastery of St. Bernard (I losing my heart to the beautiful dogs), how we went by steamer down the lake of Thun, how we gazed at the Jungfrau and saw the exquisite Staubbach, how we visited Lausanne, and Berne, and Geneva, how we stood beside the wounded Lion, and shuddered in the dungeon of Chillon, how we walked distances we never should have attempted in England, how we younger ones lost ourselves on a Sunday afternoon, after ascending a mountain, and returned footsore and weary, to meet a party going out to seek us with lanterns and ropes.  All these things have been so often described that I will not add one more description to the list, nor dwell on that strange feeling of awe, of wonder, of delight, that everyone must have felt, when the glory of the peaks clad in “everlasting snow” is for the first time seen against the azure sky on the horizon, and you whisper to yourself, half breathless:  “The Alps!  The Alps!”