"You mustn't be defacing the walls hereabouts: you're old enough to know better: move on," was the warning addressed by a police constable to an old man on whom toil as well as time had pressed heavily, but who yet seemed less bowed down by these than by some great and bitter trouble. He appeared to have been writing

*The incident here related is not an imaginary one. It is taken from the London police reports published in the newspapers: perhaps ten years ago. It passed unnoticed at the time, or with but a moment's commiseration.

with a piece of chalk some unintelligible words on the wall. On he moved without a remonstrance, unless a deep sigh might be so interpreted.

It was a bleak, raw evening in autumn. Heavy rain succeeding to the dust of a fortnight's dry weather, had had made the streets wet and slippery as after the breaking up of a frost. Thick lowering clouds, through which not a star struggled, threatened yet more rain. Wandering on apparently without any settled course, the old man stopped in another street (it was somewhere in the extreme west of the metropolis) with the same intention as before. His chalk was already applied to a dwarf garden-wall, over which, among some leafless trees, hung a lamp; when he was again interrupted by a constable on duty, who charged him with a design of leaping the wall; a harder task to him of the bent frame and shrivelled limbs than scaling the walls of Newgate would have been to his sturdy questioner. But it was the constable's business to be suspicious, and the wanderer seemed to feel that it was in the nature of his task, whatever it might be, to excite suspicion. Again he moved on as directed, with the admonition not to be again found lurking in that neighbourhood.

The wind, as he traversed the streets, seemed to oppose his progress at every turn; and the rain, which now began to fall, was sure to beat in his face, whether he moved north or south, east or west. The poor old wanderer soon came to a standstill once more. The spot was lonelier and darker, and while the shower beat fiercely against him he had recourse to his chalk, and contrived to scrawl upon some rough boards that enclosed the scaffolding of an unfinished building, amidst bricks and rubbish, a sentence or two, formed in lines anything but parallel, and of letters of many shapes and sizes. He laboured hard to make every letter dis

tinct, and connected them as well as he could in the uncertain light; but the rough surface would have puzzled an abler penman to write legibly. What he at last managed with such pain and difficulty to chalk on the boards few could have deciphered in broad daylight; even supposing that the pelting rain did not wash the inscription away before day dawned.

Having finished it, he threw upward to the heavens, now entirely obscured by chilling and dreary vapour, a look in which a feeling of hope temporarily struggled with anguish and despair; and the smile with which he turned to proceed on his comfortless and weary way, seemed to tell of something lighter at his heart than a dull and stifling sense of the utter uselessness of persevering.

For three or four hours he continued to wander on, stopping at intervals, as often as opportunity offered, to chalk upon the enclosures of new buildings, on dead walls, or on the doors of outhouses or stabling, words which he could not spell, and had barely a chance of making legible. Patiently did he repeat the essay, and slowly did he labour to give distinctness to what he wrote. Often interrupted, he constantly resumed his endeavour when the interruption ceased; as though unconscious of any difficulty that could thwart his purpose, or of any pain, insult, or outrage, that would not be far more than compensated by the bare chance, the mere possibily of ultimate success in his sad and strange adventure.

As the rain fell without intermission, and the wind dashed it with sharp and sudden force against all whom necessity doomed to traverse the streets of London on that miserable night, few passengers, even if they chanced to note the old man loitering by the door of an empty house, or chalking on some closed window-shut

ter, troubled themselves to pause and observe his proceedings. But although most of them hurried on, mindful of nothing but themselves, and the frequent pools created by the torrent that descended upon them, some passenger would now and then stop to gratify an impulse of curiosity, or of benevolent feeling it might be, to see what he was about; and many were the charitable warnings that he was in imminent danger of being sent as a vagabond to the treadmill, many the kind inquiries whether he had been employed by a quack doctor or a blacking-maker to chalk the walls of the metropolis, many the insolent and unfeeling jeers from a rabble of big boys (generally the worst tormentors misfortune can come in contact with in the streets of a great city) that the old man had to hear and to brave in the course of his desultory and painful perambulation.

Every now and then, moreover, he had to experience more legitimate and effectual interruption. The police, then recently established in the metropolis, were a body of men very different from the force in existence at the present day; far less disciplined, instructed, and considerate-plentiful as examples of a contrary character may be even now. The wretched old man had to endure all the rashness, insolence, and brutality of an unweeded and newly-raised constabulary, and frequent and fierce were the assaults to which his perseverance exposed him, as he slowly and silently crawled on his way, and then recommenced the seemingly forlorn and crazy experiment with his piece of chalk. Not with harsh and threatening words alone, but often with rude and violent thrusts, was the aged pedestrian driven along; but he renewed his attempt when out of sight, and raised his eyes every two or three minutes to the starless and unpitying sky, in muttered and inarticulate prayer for a blessing on his endeavour.

He had now threaded his way through a vast number

of streets, generally avoiding the leading and crowded thoroughfares, when he found himself in one of the obscurer parts of Marylebone. Sick at the very heart, weary to a degree that under less stimulating circumstances would have been utter exhaustion, the shops nearly all closed, and the streets scanty of passengers, while the rain, descending less fitfully with abated gusts of wind, gave sign of its continuance,—the old man did now feel desolate almost beyond endurance; when, as he passed a house that stood somewhat backward in a quiet corner of the street, a sound of merrymaking, of jocund, laughing, screaming, human voices broke upon his ear. The wanderer suddenly stopped. What a contrast between their noisy shouting revels, and the blank and dreary silence of that old man's aching heart! But his heart now beat, gently at first, and then more strongly and more quickly-beat with a pulse that owned a keen and penetrating pleasure for its mover, as his ear caught in those sounds of unrestrained and riotous rejoicings the voices of children.

There is no music like the human voice, and in that voice there is no music like the joyous prattle and the ringing laughter of children. So seemed to feel the old listener as he drew nearer to the house, and bent his ear to hearken to the mirth that, more than the wind without, appeared to be shaking the very roof to which it rose. Coarse as might be the clay of which he was formed; commonplace as in all else he might be; a being born with no more mental gifts than may be enjoyed by the meanest of his fellows, placed on earth apparently to drudge away their days, with minds hardly raising them above the brutes that divide with them the duty of labour; there was yet a feeling of the utmost possible refinement, a profound sense of sweetness and beauty, stirring in the old man, as he bent forward with his ear close to the window-shutter to