counteracted by the miserable spark of fire, which hardly sends an
attenuated thread of lingering smoke up its huge throat. A wide ditch runs
immediately at the back of these dwellings, which is filled and emptied
daily by the tide. Attached to each hovel is a small scrap of ground for a
garden, which, however, is for the most part untended and uncultivated.
Such of these dwellings as I visited to-day were filthy and wretched in
the extreme, and exhibited that most deplorable consequence of ignorance
and an abject condition, the inability of the inhabitants to secure and
improve even such pitiful comfort as might yet be achieved by them.
Instead of the order, neatness, and ingenuity which might convert even
these miserable hovels into tolerable residences, there was the careless,
reckless, filthy indolence which even the brutes do not exhibit in their
lairs and nests, and which seemed incapable of applying to the uses of
existence the few miserable means of comfort yet within their reach.
Firewood and shavings lay littered about the floors, while the half-naked
children were cowering round two or three smouldering cinders. The moss
with which the chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwellings might
have been stuffed, was trailing in dirt and dust about the ground, while
the back-door of the huts, opening upon a most unsightly ditch, was left
wide open for the fowls and ducks, which they are allowed to raise, to
travel in and out, increasing the filth of the cabin, by what they brought
and left in every direction. In the midst of the floor, or squatting round
the cold hearth, would be four or five little children from four to ten
years old, the latter all with babies in their arms, the care of the
infants being taken from the mothers (who are driven a-field as soon as
they recover from child labour), and devolved upon these poor little
nurses, as they are called, whose business it is to watch the infant, and
carry it to its mother whenever it may require nourishment. To these
hardly human little beings, I addressed my remonstrances about the filth,
cold, and unnecessary wretchedness of their room, bidding the elder boys