THE SMUGGLER. 169 



fitted to a human being! But, alas! many such still exist; 

 and it is not always, as it was in this case, that vice is the 

 companion of misery. This is no book of idle twaddle, to re- 

 present all the wealthy as cold, hard, and vicious, and the 

 poor all good, forbearing, and laborious; for evil is pretty 

 equally distributed through all classes; though, God knows! 

 the rich, with all their opportunities, ought to show a smaller 

 proportion of wickedness, and the poor might perhaps be ex- 

 pected, from their temptations, to be worse than they are! 

 Still it is hard to think that many as honest a man as ever 

 lived, ay, and as industrious a man, too, returns, after his hard 

 day's toil, to find his wife and children well nigh in starvation, 

 in such a place as I am about to describe, and none to help 

 them. 



The hut, for it did not deserve the name of cottage, was but 

 of one floor, which was formed of beaten clay, but a little 

 elevated above the surrounding soil. It contained two rooms. 

 The one opened into what had been a garden before it, running 

 down nearly to the brook-side; and the other communicated 

 with the first, but had a door which gave exit into the wood 

 behind. Windows the hut had two, one on either side; but 

 neither contained more than two cpmplete pains of glass. The 

 spaces, where glass had once been, were now filled up in a 

 strange variety of ways. Here was a piece of board nailed in ; 

 there a coarse piece of cloth kept out the wind; another broken 

 pane was filled up with paper; and another, were some frag- 

 ments of the original substance remained, was stopped with an 

 old stocking stuffed with straw. In the garden, as it was still 

 called, appeared a few cabbages and onions, with more cab- 

 bage-stalks than either, and a small patch of miserable 

 potatoes. But weeds were the most plentiful of all, and 

 duckweed and groundsel enough appeared there to have sup- 

 plied a whole forest of singing birds. It had been once fenced 

 in, that miserable garden ; but the wood had been pulled down 

 and burned for firing by its present tenants, or others as 

 wretched in circumstances as themselves ; and nought remained 

 but a strong post here and there, with sometimes a many- 

 coloured rag of coarse cotton fluttering upon some long, rusty 

 nail, which had snatched a shred from passing poverty. Three 

 or four stunted gooseberry bushes, however, marked out the 

 limit on one side ; a path ran in front between the garden and 



