he has imparted some of his labour, and therefore has a prior claim to it." The crossing-sweeper surely imparts some of his labour, and deserves a return for the benefit you reap from it. People should not fancy their pennies are so difficult to get at; to unbutton a coat is easy, but to go without a pennyworth of bread, as your poor almsman may, is very hard. And do not throw it down on the ground when you have got it out, but give it into the man's hand like a Christian; they are only fools and parvenues that treat poverty with contempt. As the wet days get fine, it is high fun to see what shifts they are put to to show something for their money; brush, brush, brush, till the stones are polished. The man who can longest hold out against a dry week is the sweeper of Lansdowne-passage, beside Lansdowne-house. We remember watching him one fine day, as we were passing, sweeping, in a grave and business-like manner, a little heap of dust from one end of the lane to the other. The next day we happened to be passing the same passage, but in an opposite direction; when we came to the end there was our old friend the sweeper, leaning his hand upon his brush, and contemplating the self-same little heap of dust, tastefully brushed up all round into a little cone, not bigger than the sand in a good-sized hour-glass. The

sight was almost melancholy. We believe he gave it up

soon afterwards, shouldered his brush, and hied to "fresh fields and pastures new ; ". but how that little heap must have journeyed backwards and forwards before it was allowed to rest in peace! The sweepers have their regular crossings, and if an interloper should happen to step in, he will soon find out he is on leasehold property, and

R

you

must budge. They are not very lucrative posts, although there is a tradition about the holder of the richest (the Bank crossing) keeping his country house and his cab. The highest sum ever got by any of them at one time, that we could hear upon inquiry, was a sixpence, and a ‘Dialogue between Richard and Harry,” a religious tract, given by a good lady of the Mrs. Fry class. A man should put halfpence in his pocket in bad weather; it is well to purchase a "God bless you! !" even if know that your eleemosynary copper goes the next moment to one of the gin-shops, which, like a moral scurvy, seem to have seized upon every joint and corner of the metropolitan anatomy. We know a gentleman who is so scrupulously honest on the point of rewarding the sweepers, that if, when he came home, he remembered that he had passed one of them without giving, he would issue out again, and, by way of punishment, give largess to every sweeper in the neighbourhood. A fine spirit moved him—a rare one, indeed, in these hard utilitarian times. Beggars are sadly gone down in this England of ours-they should all be Catholic, the true religion of mendicants. They might then, by chance, have their feet washed by the Pope on Holy Thursday, and be thus made aristocrats among their fellows for life. As a class, all the poetry is gone out of them. At the door of some almshouse, an old woman may still be seen with her clack-dish before her at certain seasons of the year-the last of her race-reminding one of times long past, when there were no such things as mendicity societies, and charity was considered a thing which

"Blesses him that gives, and him that takes."

WENHAM LAKE ICE.

IF, in the mid summer, when everything was still with heat, and the cattle and the sheep crowded under the great trees for shade, and the house-dog lay panting, with his tongue hanging from his mouth, a little child were to come to us and beg for a cup of water, what would it think if we were to tell it this tale ?

A very long way off, in the New World, there is a great cup, hundreds of feet deep, made in the mountains. This cup is always full of crystal water, which in the winter season gets so cold that great ships come and carry it all over the world, so that every person, when he is heated as you are, can, if he likes, have a draught of its delicious icy

contents.

In all probability the child would think we were telling it some tale of Fairyland, and would not dream that we were speaking of an everyday working fact. Yet such is the case the crystal cup is the Wenham Lake, held in a hollow of the mountains in New Hampshire, Massachusetts. This lake, which is of small extent, having only an area of 500 acres, is supplied by springs which issue from its rocky bottom; its waters are so pure that analysis cannot detect any foreign elements held either in suspension or in combination.

This condition of purity is not alone, however, the cause of the celebrity which the ice formed from it has of late years attained throughout the world, and especially in England: there are many such lakes in America capable of producing equally good ice, and which are indeed used as the ice farms, if we may so term them, for home consumption: the real reason of the celebrity of the ice produced from the Wenham Lake lies in the fact of its being near the seaboard, which enables the company to which it belongs to ship it easily to all parts of the world. This lake is only eighteen miles north-east of Boston, and by means of the Eastern Railway, which receives a branch line from the lake itself, is within an hour's run of the wharf at that city; so that, for all practical purposes, the ice might be said to be formed at the ship's side. These unusual facilities have enabled the company to withstand competition, otherwise the market of England would soon have become keenly contested by the Yankee ice speculators, for this article is extensively used in America, and large sheets of water are utilized as much as mines; and here, when nature is everywhere else at rest, the ice farmer watches with anxiety the product of his watery acres, ripening through the absence of the sun.

If it were not for the difficulties of conveyance, Barnum would have been long ere this looking upon the Mer de Glace as a speculative lot, and making bids for all the mountain peaks of Europe above the snow line. Owing to this drawback, however, it is found more practicable to bring even this perishing commodity a distance of three thousand miles.

The ice trade in America has long reached a magnitude

of which we in the old country have no conception. What we consider a luxury brother Jonathan has long looked upon as a common necessary of life. He cannot live without a plentiful supply of ice. It might be urged that this is owing to the great heat of the American summers. Perhaps so; but that which at one season of the year is desirable and delicious, at another can only be indulged in through habit. The Americans consume pretty much the same quantity of ice in the winter as in the summer. With every meal it is placed upon the table, and it forms a constituent of all their drinks. In England, a publican will tell you that two-thirds of his spirit-drinking customers will call for hot brandy-and-water; in an American liquorstore, the constant demand is for a glass of sherry with a knob of ice in it, or cocktail, or mint julep, with the like accompaniment of liquefying crystal.

The aggregate consumption of this article throughout the States must be something enormous, for in Boston alone upwards of 50,000 tons are consumed annually-a much larger quantity than is used throughout England. The ice crop of America is consequently of great national importance; and as it is liable to perish by change of weather, even more quickly than grain, human ingenuity has been brought into play to cut and house it with a speed and regularity strongly contrasting with the rude manner of smashing it with poles and shovelling in the irregular lumps, such as we see practised upon our homegrown ice.

The scene at Wenham Lake after a hard frost is highly interesting. At first sight, the stranger is puzzled to make out the meaning of the process he sees going on upon the