of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state, and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the strange element into our inmost being.  Had the Queen been there, I know not how she could have escaped the necessity.  What an intimate brotherhood is this in which we dwell, do what we may to put an artificial remoteness between the high creature and the low one!  A poor man’s breath, borne on the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, floats into a palace-window and reaches the nostrils of a monarch.  It is but an example, obvious to the sense, of the innumerable and secret channels by which, at every moment of our lives, the flow and reflux of a common humanity pervade us all.  How superficial are the niceties of such as pretend to keep aloof!  Let the whole world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of us all can be clean.

By-and-by we came to the ward where the children were kept, on entering which, we saw, in the first place, several unlovely and unwholesome little people lazily playing together in a court-yard.  And here a singular incommodity befell one member of our party.  Among the children was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, (about six years old, perhaps, but I know not whether a girl or a boy,) with a humor in its eyes and face, which the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared to bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddled about gropingly, as if in quest of it did not precisely know what.  This child—­this sickly, wretched, humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it must have required several generations of guilty progenitors to render so pitiable an object as we beheld it—­immediately took an unaccountable fancy to the gentleman just hinted at.  It prowled about him like a pet kitten, rubbing against his legs, following everywhere at his heels, pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all the speed that its poor limbs were capable of, got directly before him and held forth its arms, mutely insisting on being taken up.  It said not a word, being perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle.  But it smiled up in his face,—­a sort of woful gleam was that smile, through the sickly blotches that covered its features,—­and found means to express such a perfect confidence that it was going to be fondled and made much of, that there was no possibility in a human heart of balking its expectation.  It was as if God had promised the poor child this favor on behalf of that individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract, or else no longer call himself a man among men.  Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for him to do, he being a person burdened with more than an Englishman’s customary reserve, shy of actual contact with human beings, afflicted with a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, and, furthermore, accustomed to that habit of observation from an insulated stand-point which is said (but, I hope, erroneously) to have the tendency of putting ice into the blood.