be possible to rescue them at all.  These unfortunate children, too, were certain to get abrasions on their bare feet and on their elbows and knees from the rough edges of the bricks.  The soot working into these abrasions gave them a peculiar form of sore.  Think of the terrible brutality to which a nervous child must have been subjected before he could be induced to undertake so hateful a journey for the first time.  Should the boy hesitate to ascend, many of the master-sweeps had no compunction in giving him what was termed a “tickler”—­that is, in lighting some straw in the grate below him.  The poor little urchin had perforce to scramble up his chimney then, to avoid being roasted alive.

All honour to the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist, who as Lord Ashley never rested in the House of Commons until he got a measure placed on the Statute Book making the employment of climbing-boys illegal.

It will be remembered that little Tom, the hero of Charles Kingsley’s delightful Water-Babies, was a climbing-sweep.  In spite of all my care, I occasionally met some of these little fellows in the passages, inky-black with soot from the soles of their bare feet to the crowns of their heads, except for the whites of their eyes.  They could not have been above eight or nine years old.  I looked on them as awful warnings, for of course they would not have occupied their present position had they not been little boys who had habitually disobeyed the orders of their nurses.

Even the wretched little climbing-boys had their gala-day on the 1st of May, when they had a holiday and a feast under the terms of Mrs. Montagu’s will.

The story of Mrs. Montagu is well known.  The large house standing in a garden at the corner of Portman Square and Gloucester Place, now owned by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu by James Wyatt at the end of the eighteenth century, and the adjoining Montagu Street and Montagu Square derive their names from her.  Somehow Mrs. Montagu’s only son got kidnapped, and all attempts to recover the child failed.  Time went on, and he was regarded as dead.  On a certain 1st of May the sweeps arrived to clean Mrs. Montagu’s chimneys, and a climbing-boy was sent up to his horrible task.  Like Tom in the Water-Babies, he lost his way in the network of flues and emerged in a different room to the one he had started from.  Something in the aspect of the room struck a half-familiar, half-forgotten chord in his brain.  He turned the handle of the door of the next room and found a lady seated there.  Then he remembered.  Filthy and soot-stained as he was, the little sweep flung himself into the arms of the beautiful lady with a cry of “Mother!” Mrs. Montagu had found her lost son.

In gratitude for the recovery of her son, Mrs. Montagu entertained every climbing-boy in London at dinner on the anniversary of her son’s return, and arranged that they should all have a holiday on that day.  At her death she left a legacy to continue the treat.