than money or education—or the absence of one or both that separates trades from each other, or one class of work-people from another; and it is exceedingly difficult for one whose dress, manners, and conversation mark him as belonging to the professional, commercial, or gentlemanly classes to establish friendly and intimate relations with the peasantry and lower orders of labourers, or to get at the secrets of their moral and intellectual life. To call upon poor working people in their homes, suggests to them that you have a "mission"-religious or otherwise-to reform or lecture them, and they immediately-whether male or female-put on a mental armour to defy you. They do not like to be preached at, or lectured, or patronised, by "unco' guid" or "rigidly righteous" people; and though they will most likely take your money if you offer it, you will get but little insight into their mode of life or habits of thought, if you talk to them for a twelvemonth. They are on their guard against you, and will not admit you into their confidence, strive as hard as you may. If you sit with them in their beerhouses, they discover at a glance, in whatever way you may have dressed yourself, that you are not one of them; and they look upon you as a flock of sheep might look upon a wolf, or a congregation of crows upon an alien magpie, who had obtruded into their clan or companionship. But

when you meet with them on the country roads and tramp along with them for miles, not having forced yourself upon their company, but offering it or accepting it, as from man to man, you may often make the acquaintance of some very excellent people, from whom you can sometimes learn more than they can learn from you. If they have not the knowledge of books-and even in this respect some of them are by no means ignorant-they have the knowledge of things: and if they look upon man and nature, fate and circumstance, and on the rights and wrongs of the poor, with eyes different from yours, and, perhaps, from a totally opposite point of view, you acquire a new kind of experience, and, it may be, learn something of the previously unsuspected fires and forces that lie smouldering and latent in the hearts of the multitude, of which our lawgivers are often wholly unaware, and which they would not, perhaps, credit on any authority but that of their own experience. "It may be some entertainment,” says Robert Burns, in a letter to his friend Robert Riddel, of Glenriddel, “to a curious observer of human nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of love, ambition, anxiety, and grief, with like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate, I believe, pretty much alike on all the species." Agreeing with Robert Burns in

this particular, not only as regards ploughmen, but labouring men of every description, I never neglect an opportunity to exchange ideas with them, and to inquire how and on what they live; what opinions they form of their own class, and of the classes above and below them; what notions, if any, they have of the government of their own or other countries; what are their enjoyments, their sorrows, their prejudices; whether they attend church or chapel; and what are their ideas of the divine government of the world, and their hopes, if they have any, of a hereafter.

THE ROAD MENDER.

NE of the most respectable men I know, and whose acquaintance I made upon the highway where he does his daily

work, is employed to keep three miles of the public road in order. The road winds through a beautiful country, and need not be more particularly specified, lest my good friend the labourer should be pointed out too particularly to the notice of the public of his own neighbourhood. He bears an aristocratic name, and were he dressed in the garb of a gentleman would present a distinguished if not an aristocratic appearance. Pass him when I will, he is always at his work. He labours as if he liked his employment; he never loiters, or dozes, or takes unfair advantage of his paymaster to "scamp" the job in hand. He clears the pathway from weeds, trims the hedges, sees that the water-courses are clear, looks to the drains, scrapes the horse manure into little heaps by the roadside to be carted away

by the agencies appointed for the purpose; levels the roadway wherever it gets worn into holes or ruts, by shovelling in the necessary amount of macadam; and every day has enough to occupy him in all these matters, and fill up the requisite number of hours that he is bound to labour. He has got, it seems, to be very much attached to his three miles of woodland road. He knows every tree on either side, and how old it is; he can point out those that are the favourite haunts of the squirrel and the dormouse; and he is acquainted with the common but not with the botanical names of all the hedge flowers and herbs in his district. He is close upon sixty years of age, but looks older, and is seldom to be seen without his short pipe in his mouth, unless when he is spoken to.

"What wages do you earn, Mr. Stanley?" I one day asked him. Stanley is not his name, but he has one quite as aristocratic.

"You have a wife and family?"

"A wife and five children."

"Are any of the children old enough to earn anything?"

"Not one.

The oldest is only ten."

"And how can you feed them all, on two shillings a day?"

"God knows," he replied. "I don't.

The wife