mother, scarcely weaned, on a high, cold stone, barefooted, before the
anvil; there to harden, sear, and blister his young hands by heating and
hammering ragged nailrods, for the sustenance those breasts can no
longer supply! Lord John! look at those nails, as they lie hissing on
the block. Know you their meaning, use and language? Please your
lordship, let me tell you--I have made nails many a day and many a
night--_they are iron exclamation points_, which this unlettered,
dwarfed boy is unconsciously arraying against you, against the British
government, and the government of British literature, for cutting him
off without a letter of the English alphabet, when printing is done by
steam; for incarcerating him for no sin on his parents' side, but
poverty, in a dark, six-by-eight prison of hard labor, a _youthless_
being--think of it!--an infant hardened, almost in its mother's arms,
into a man, by toil that bows the sturdiest of the world's laborers who
come to manhood through the intervening years of childhood!

The boy's father was at work with his back toward me, when I entered. At
my first word of salutation to the lad, he turned around and accosted me
a little bashfully, as if unaccustomed to the sight of strangers in that
place, or reluctant to let them into the scene and secret of his
poverty. I sat down upon one end of his nail-bench, and told him I was
an American blacksmith by trade, and that I had come in to see how he
got on in the world; whether he was earning pretty good wages at his
business, so that he could live comfortably, and send his children to
school. As I said this, I glanced inquiringly toward the boy, who was
looking steadily at me from his stone stool by the anvil. Two or three
little crock-faced girls, from two to five years of age, had stolen in
timidly, and a couple of young, frightened eyes were peering over the
door-sill at me. The poor Englishman--he was as much an Englishman as
the Duke of Wellington--looked at his bushy-headed, barefooted children,