for a continuance. If you walk twenty
miles a day for fourteen days, you make two
hundred and eighty in a fortnight. You have
time to spare and can take things leisurely.
But will three pounds carry you through?"

"Like a prince! Three pounds for a fortnight!
why that makes thirty shillings a week!
and for twenty years my wages, working like a
slave, have not been above fourteen shillings
a week; when I was younger only ten or
eleven."

"Did you work your whole time for this
pittance? or did you take St. Monday, and half
of Saturday, as holidays?"

"I had no holiday. There was no blue Monday
for me. Every day was alike, twelve hours',
sometimes fourteen hours' work, and Saturday
was just like any other. Some of my mates
worked half the Sunday, too, to screw up their
earnings to fifteen shillings. But I never
did."

"Why not? Have you any objection to
Sunday work?" I put this question thinking
that, for the first time in my life, I had fallen
in with a specimen of that very rare bird, on
English earth, a church-going London mechanic.

"I had very great objections."

"Were they serious?"

"Very serious."

"Religious?"

"Well! I'm not very sure. I think not. Six
days' work in a week are sufficient for any man;
and I like my Sunday's rest, and enjoy it."

"For the sake of going to church?"

"Church be——!" Well, I cannot write
his vulgar and obscene anathema. I pressed my
question a little further. " If you don't go to
church—why don't you? Do you prefer chapel?
Or, if you neither go to church nor chapel, how
do you employ the day of rest?"

"I don't go either to church or chapel,
because I would rather read a book than listen to
a sermon; and because the preachers tell me
nothing that satisfies my reason, or comforts
my soul—if I've got a soul. I don't go because
I can`t fee the pew-opener to give me a seat.
I don't go because I don't think that I or any
other poor man should be put in a place apart
in God's own house, and marked as a pauper in
a building, when the preacher tells us that we
are all equal; or tells us sometimes that the
poor are to be better off in the next world than
the rich. Lazarus, you know, went to heaven
and Dives to the other place. And, besides,
Sunday is my only day for a little fresh air; and
I like to go into the fields and lay on my back
in the grass, if it does not rain, thankful to God,
in my misery, that I can look up to the sky,
and think of him as my Heavenly Father."

I did not like to press Mr. Crump much
further on this point, though he was communicative
enough, as will be seen, and might have
thrown some light upon the theology of the
poor, and shown where and how the church
and the chapel fail to reach the classes below
that of the small shop-keepers. I ventured on
only one more question.

"Do you understand the doctrine preached
in church or chapel, if you ever go to either?"

"I understand as much as this—that I don't
believe in the doctrine; or, at all events, that I
believe in verv little of it. I believe in the Rise
of Man, not in the Fall of Man. It seems to
me, and I have thought a good deal more on
such subjects than you might imagine, that man
has never yet had fair play in the world; and
that the only place where he is likely to get it
is in America."

My new friend, as will be seen, was an
"advanced Thinker," and appeared, as far as I
could judge, by his answers to my remarks, as
well as to my questions, to have thought out
these matters for himself, with the aid of hints
in the newspapers. But he suddenly seemed
to grow suspicious of me on this subject, as if
he had a misgiving that I was a clergyman in
disguise, or was going to inveigle him into a
theological argument; so I dropped the subject,
and gradually put him at his ease, which
I did over a crust of bread and cheese and a
glass of ale at a public-house parlour in St.
Albans.

"How could you manage to keep a wife and
three children on fourteen shillings a week?"
I inquired, as we resumed our walk.

"Keep them! I couldn't keep them—though
some people have to keep a wife and half a
dozen children on the money. We lived in rags
and misery, and had not half enough to eat.
We had but a single back room; it was kitchen,
parlour, bedroom, and workshop, all in one;
and we only had a glimpse of sunlight on the
tiles for a couple of hours a day. My wife
earned a little at shirt making, about three or
four shillings, that paid the rent and helped us
along a little. She is a sober woman, and
works as well as she can—never drinks anything
but tea or coffee, and a little beer on the
Sunday. If she had taken to gin, as many
poor women do, I should have been in the
workhouse or the madhouse, most likely."

"Had you butcher's meat for a portion of
your diet?"

"Not what you would call butcher's meat, but
we got something that answered the purpose;
the rind of ham from the ham and beef shops,
that they sell with odds and ends of skin and
fat at threehalfpence a pound, and that makes
tolerably good soup, with the aid of pepper and
salt and a little rice and onions. Then we had
beef bones to boil down into broth, with barley
or rice. But it was a constant struggle to get
bread enough for the children. Butter we never
saw or tasted; and milk was not often within
our means. Sometimes, in Whitechapel, where
we lived, there was a glut of herrings or
mackerel—three for a penny sometimes—and then
we had a feast. Sprats, also, were sometimes
the cheapest and the best food in the market—
a slap-up luxury for the poor, I can tell you."

"Do you smoke?"

"No, thank Heaven! the smell of tobacco is
disagreeable to me; and sometimes when I have
been in company with half a dozen smokers in