Heawever con it be?
Iv aw don't get some brade to eat,
Aw think 'at aw mun dee."
--Hungry Child.

It was about noon when we left the old weaver, nursing his rheumatic
limbs by the side of a dim fire, in his chapel-like little house.
His daughter, a tall, clean, shy girl, began to peel a few potatoes
just before we came away. It is a touching thing, just now, to see
so many decent cottages of thrifty working men brought low by the
strange events of these days; cottages in which everything betokens
the care of well-conducted lives, and where the sacred fire of
independent feeling is struggling through the long frost of
misfortune with patient dignity. It is a touching thing to see the
simple joys of life, in homes like these, crushed into a speechless
endurance of penury, and the native spirit of self-reliance writhing
in unavoidable prostration, and hoping on from day to day for better
times. I have seen many such places in my wanderings during these
hard days--cottages where all was so sweet and orderly, both in
person and habitation, that, but for the funereal stillness which
sat upon hunger-nipt faces, a stranger would hardly have dreamt that
the people dwelling there were undergoing any uncommon privation. I
have often met with such people in my rambles,--I have often found
them suffering pangs more keen than hunger alone could inflict,
because they arose from the loss of those sweet relations of
independence which are dear to many of them as life itself. With
such as these--the shy, the proud, the intelligent and uncomplaining
endurers--hunger is not the hardest thing that befalls:-

"When the mind's free,