"from the beginning," taking in his grizzly fingers the blushrose, and stripping its stem until the iron wire of which it was composed was laid bare. Before even this thread of metal can be produced, men must dive into the bowels of the earth to procure the ore and the fuel with which to smelt it. "I will show you the true history of the making of this bonnet." With that he turned the focus of the lantern upon the wall, and I saw a picture of a deep pit into which men continually kept entering, and as continually emerging from, like so many emmets, black and filthy to the last degree; and further in the mine, toiling up steep ascents, women on their hands and knees, with chains round their bodies, dragged up the heavy corves of coal.*

"But this," said I," surely is not fit employment for women?" "Well," said he with a shrug, as if mimicking a general expression, "what's to be done? Somebody must do it."

With that he changed the slides, and I saw a child, not more than five years old, sitting in a narrow low passage in the remotest darkness of the mine. I saw him pull something he held in his hand, a little door opened, and the woman harnessed to the corve passed onwards; the door shut to, and the child was again in the darkness, huddled up in the corner to protect himself from the cold and damp. Noticing my surprise, my strange visitor remarked, "This sort of thing soon uses them up, but there are plenty more in the labour-market.' What so cheap as flesh and blood? But we have forged the tough iron and spun the fine wire. Now for the artist's touch."

As he spoke, a fresh slide rattled through the lantern; and in a mean room I saw a poor girl, winding delicate gauze round the iron wire, and with wan fingers, mocking nature in one of her most beautiful moods. As she added petal after petal of the rose she was making, she stole hour after hour from the night. "You see," said he, "she tints the flower from the colour of her own poor cheek. Alas! that the human rose should decay that

* Since this paper was written, this degrading kind of labour has been prohibited by the Legislature.

this artificial thing might flourish!" He said this sadly, but immediately added, in his usual tone, "but there-what's to be done? The pay is slow starvation, I admit; but these women crowd the labour-market so, that they are glad enough to slave even at this work—if not, a worse fate awaits them."

"But we have only got as far as the flower in our lecture," he said, and held out the blush-rose he had taken from the bonnet; he then put it aside with the triumphant air of one who has just made a successful demonstration.

"Here," said he, holding up a piece of the glazed calico lining, "I will show you something interesting about this," and immediately threw out upon the wall a picture which differed from all that had gone before it. Tall palms, and all the luxuriant vegetation of the East, shot up. Then a village was seen upon the banks of the Ganges. In the open air workmen sat at their looms weaving cloth, and singing as they wove.

"Have you noticed the scene enough?" said he. I nodded, the picture dissolved, and instead of the former scene of beauty and industry, I saw a village in ruins, through which the wild dog alone roamed, and the jungle grew up to its very foot.

"You see," said he, anticipating my eager query as to the cause of this change, "when the power-loom first began to revolve, and the tall chimneys of Manchester to rise, the poor rude looms on the banks of the Ganges, and their frugal, industrious workers, perished at a blow. But you know competition is the order of the day-the weak in these times must go to the wall."

Perceiving that I did not exactly understand the Christian spirit of this doctrine, he added, with a more earnest tone— "Perhaps the time will come, when the transition from a slow to a more speedy method of production, through the agency of machinery, will be made with some mitigation of all this sudden and unlooked for misery-but while I am moralizing my lamp is burning, and I have a score of slides yet to show you."

With that the lantern threw upon the wall another picture. It was an African desert, and an Arab on horseback was hunting

down the swift ostrich, which with outspread wings sailed along the burning sand. At length, worn out by the greater power of endurance of his pursuer, he was taken and slain, and his captor rewarded himself for his trouble by plucking from the yet bleeding bird his waving plumage. In the distance, a caravan comes winding along towards some distant mart, to which the Arab attaches himself-the wells fail the moving multitude, and one by one man and beast fall, and leave their whitened bones as a track-mark for future travellers across the waste; but the mercandise is borne home, though human life is lost.

"You would not think, to see with what negligent elegance this feather falls," said the stranger, holding up its white sweep, "that man had given even life in the struggle to bring it to this perfection. But there, what's to be done?-we always thought more of matter than of man. We have not quite finished yet," said he, taking up the cane framework of the bonnet ; we must go to the New World for our next picture."

As he spoke, he adjusted a new slide, and showed a Brazilian plantation, in which the slaves laboured under fear of the cowhide of the overseer. "The bees who make the honey," said he, with his cold sneer, "how grateful man is to them! I suppose you think we have no such slaves. I have two or three choice slides here," said he, holding up the transparent glasses—“a figure or so of an exhausted milliner, and a Spitalfields weaver in his little garret, weaving inch by inch of glossy satin, whilst his own poor family have only rags to cover them; but I have shown you enough of the misery that has gone towards making this little trifle. The pretty little miss, when she puts it on, and carries it so lightly on her head, will little think how it has been delved, and forged, and weaved, and built up into such becoming fashion-but 'tis worth a thought about." With that he blew lightly on the scattered materials, and they rushed together again as speedily as they had before fallen to pieces.

"And now," said he, in the rising tone of one coming to his peroration, "I am not altogether such a bad sort of a spirit as