Thus twice had I seen the cup held to his lips and dashed away; twice had I seen him strong in hope, and twice in disappointment deep. Where now, boy, is thy energy? where thy spirit, thy resolution? Methinks thou needst them now. Alas! thou art but a child; and at thy age the green fields, where birds are blithely singing, or the jocund playground with young kindred spirits, where sport hath its daring and its perseverance too, were more fitting place to bring forth such exalted qualities than the crowded street—where want, perhaps, spurs thee to attempt; where fortune frowns upon thee, and seems hope to whisper only to deceive! Courage thou hast no more. Energy, it has left thee; else wouldst thou not so dejectedly hang thy head, and creep along the street as though thou wert upon forbidden ground, or trespassing in sharing the light of the fading day and the breath of heaven with those who are heedlessly hurrying past thee.
After his last unsuccessful application, I next saw the dispirited little fellow turn down a small, little-frequented street, and, with the intention of meeting and speaking to him, I made a short détour, soon gaining the opposite end of the street which I had seen him enter. The buildings consisted entirely of warehouses, which were all closed for the night; and knowing that he could scarcely have entered one of them, I was not a little surprised to find the street apparently deserted. Advancing a few paces, however, the mystery was soon solved. Nestling in the corner of a warehouse doorway, with his head resting on his little hand, my eyes fell upon the wanderer I was in search of. Absorbed in his grief, I approached him unseen, unheard. Ah! need I say that he was weeping bitterly?
Reader, the boy had a home; I saw it; a cellar, whose bare walls and brick-uncovered floor bespoke it the abode of poverty and misery. He was not an orphan; for on a heap of rags, which served her for a bed, I saw an emaciated figure which he called his mother; a brother and a sister, too, were there, younger than my guide, and in their tattered, dirty garments scarcely distinguishable from the bed of rags on which they were huddled beside the dying woman. He was not an orphan; the young street-wanderer had a father. Him, too, I saw; a rude, blear-eyed drunkard, whose countenance it was fearful to look upon; for there might be seen that the worst passions of our common nature had with him obtained a perilous ascendency—a brute, whose intellect, perhaps never bright, had become more brutal under the influence of the fire-spirit, to which he bore conspicuous marks of being a groveling soul-and-body slave. To me he appeared like the demon Ruin midst the wreck around. On him, now that the wife could work no more, were they dependent. Need I say that there were days when they scarce tasted food, when the young wanderer had been unsuccessful in the streets? and when hungry, tired, and dejected, he gave current to his grief, as when I found him in the midst of his heart-breaking sorrow?
Yes, my first surmise was painfully correct. He had, indeed, commenced life's warfare for himself; young as he was, it was his fate to battle his way on the path of life, and not a soul to advise and guard him against the demon Crime, whose favorite haunts are the footsteps of the ignorant and needy.
Reader, how many of the victims of crime who fill our prisons, were their histories known, would prove to have commenced life like this boy! Not always, then, let us unpitying behold the criminal, who, in his early manhood or the prime of life, is banished from his country, or suffers the dread penalty of death, without reflecting how much those who brought him into the world were concerned with so melancholy an issue—without reflecting that, like the little fellow of whom these pages tell, he may have had a father little better than the brute of the field, and in his childish years have been turned out to get his bread—a wanderer in the streets.
THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THOS. MORE.
LIBELLUS A MARGARETA MORE, QUINDECIM ANNOS NATA, CHELSEIÆ INCEPTVS.
"Nulla dies sine linea."