one of which has now 250, and the others about 100 each, in attendancemaking a total of about 850, at a weekly cost in payments to the young men alone, without reference to other expenses, of 351. The classes are under the superintendence of the clergy; reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught; and for five days' attendance per week the allowance is 1s. 6d.--or 3d. per day should the the attendance be irregular. These classes also, so orderly and quiet, are a cheering sight in presence of so much distress. The total cost of their formation and maintenance has hitherto been defrayed by the clergy, who have appealed for aid, as they did in respect of the sewing classes, to their brethren in other parts of the country; but the relief committee have now determined, as we have already said, to make a grant towards their support similar to that which they make towards the maintenance of the sewing classes. In connexion with some of the Dissenting congregations there are also classes for young men; but the number in attendance is comparatively limited. Α large class has recently been formed by the Roman Catholics, which will, no doubt, greatly increase in numbers so soon as the funds of the relief committee are available for its maintenance.

The Industrial Class in Blackburn, which we have only just named, owns its existence to Mrs. J. G. Potter, of Little Mytton Hall, near Whalley. It is a class which now numbers about 300 men of all ages, who are taught tailoring, shoe-making, clog-mending and the rougher descriptions of carpentry, and during certain hours of the day receive instruction in the ordinary branches of education. The class meets in the unoccupied rooms of a factory, and is under the superintendence of the clergy of Holy Trinity parish-the Rev. Dr. Robinson, incumbent, and the Rev. W. Ogden, the curate. The weekly expense of this class is upwards of 25l.; which has hitherto been defrayed by private benevolence.

In the same district of the town, and under the same management, is Mrs. Pot

ter's Orphanage, or Home Class, where about thirty orphan girls, who would otherwise be homeless, find shelter and many of the comforts which are seldom enjoyed except under the parental roof. This "home class" is in connexion with the "Society for placing unemployed factory women in temporary domestic service." With the existence, and to some extent with the operations of this society, the public are pretty familiar, through the letters which Mrs. Potter has addressed on the subject to the Times; and it may suffice here to say that 203 young women have, through the agency of this society, found places of refuge from the destitution which awaits them in Blackburn, and that, with very few exceptions, they express themselves grateful for the blessing, while the benevolent people who have opened their houses for their reception are pleased with their orderly and respectful demeanour. The costs incurred on behalf of this movement are upwards of 7001.

In the same district of the townwhich is one of the poorest, and where happily there labours a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Robinson, who considers no expenditure of time and toil too great in his pious duty-there have been established "Penny Bible reading classes" for both men and women. Their origin was most unpretentious, and their success has been extraordinary. Their origin we may give in the words of the appeal of Dr. Robinson and his curate:

"Instead of giving indiscriminate help to the crowds of poor starving creatures who constantly come to us for a penny soup ticket, we began, merely as an experiment, penny Bible reading classes at the beginning of last week. For one hour's reading of the Bible we give to each attendant one penny. The men and women are assembled in two separate buildings, under the charge of some of our pious Sunday School teachers. first about a dozen came, next day about fifty; and, gradually, as the classes became better known, crowds flocked to them, who were taken in and instructed in relays hour by hour, from nine in the morning until twelve,

and from two until four o'clock.'

At

The daily attendance at each of these classes is now upwards of one thou

I AM a solitary man. For a good many summers and winters now I have lived in London; but I know few persons in it, and none intimately. I visit no one. There have been weeks together during which I have not opened my lips to any human being, unless it were the waiter at the little-frequented place where I usually dine, or the servant in the house where I lodge. My time is divided between long sittings alone in my own room, generally spent in reading, and aimless walks in the streets and about the suburbs.

Few, I should think, even of those born in London, know London so well as I do. In the maze of streets and lanes that form its heart I know by daily footings every turn and winding; successive excursions north, south, east and west, from this central block of the vast city have made me acquainted with those scarcely less populous tracts of built road and street, with odd squares and polygons interpersed, that surround it in all directions before the suburbs are reached; and my walks have extended themselves at almost every point so far beyond the boundary where even the suburban brick-and-lime ceases and the green fields begin, and, during these remoter walks, I have been so much in the habit of skirting right and left and zig-zagging among the villages and hamlets that yet remain, with their quaint inns and deserted smithies and wheelwrights' shops, to mark the forgotten No. 39.-VOL. VII.

circuit of the first stage from the metropolis in the old coaching-days, that, when I hear of proposals for the fortification of London, my fancy at once traces the probable circumference and dots many well-remembered spots which I suppose the ramparts will cross and connect. These walks of mine, both within and without London, have been in all seasons. I know the streets both by day and by night. The country round is familiar to me both in the rich summer season, when it vies in various beauty with any in England, and in the winter months, when either the snow is on the ground, or the air is dull and brown, the trees stand leafless, and the ways are foul. On the whole, however, my walks into the country have been chiefly in summer and autumn, and during the day. In the winter, and in my night-walks, I keep most to the streets on both sides of the river, or, at least, within the space reticulated by the long straggling rows of the gaslamps ere the outer blackness begins. I have, indeed, a strange fascination for the nocturnal aspects of cities and their scenery. London during the day seems to me, in physical respects, a supremely ugly city, in which, with the exception of St. Paul's and one or two views from the bridges and river-banks, there is nothing, in the way of shape or combination of mere object, able to seize and rouse the eye and the thought as one passes. But London by night is

M

inexhaustibly glorious. By night, indeed, the smallest and poorest village that there is, the merest cluster of cottages or rude hovels flung together in a hollow or at a bend of a high road, contracts a sombre impressiveness. Details are obscured; and, involved for the time in the Earth's great shadow, which brings out the stars, the puny walls and shafts and gables which man's hand has reared become somehow more a part of the wheeling globe itself, and help, by their jutting forms and angles, in those near oppositions of light and darkness, that variously-shaded massing and fretting and interlacing of black on a universal ground of pale silver, in which Night exults as her peculiar scenic wealth, and by which she teaches man lessons that are hardly taught by her more garish Brother. Nor in large towns does Night part with many of those effects with which she thus plays among the villages scattered over the dark country. For what may be lost, at all events, there is more than a recompense in the greater heights and depths and lengths of fabric among which she weaves her shadowy phantasies, and in the concentrations and ranges of artificial lights which break, with bursts of lurid yellow and the roar of accompanying night-traffic, or else with far-off twinklings and flickerings, what might else be too vast a monotony of grey and gloom. And so London, because of its very vastness, is a noble city for one who, like myself, has the habit of solitary walking at unseasonable hours with no other end than that of partly escaping, partly indulging, reveries that Fate and Chance have made among the saddest. Oh! the dark, dreary, and yet soul-exercising and soul-soothing walks that its nocturnal vastness has afforded me! Many a night through its flaring centre have my feet carried me, round and round again through labyrinths of alleys, to the same more open and bus ling spots-little attentive, and yet not altogether inattentive, to the crowde! shows of vice, merriment and misery there to be met with; and many a night, unable to bear the thought

of yet returning to my rooms, have I suddenly turned away from these too noisy and luminous haunts, and, prolonging my walk unconsciously through some main line of street leading to the quiet outskirts, found myself at last, after many turnings, in regions of villas and railed terraces, so desolate that the one watchman whom I met on his rounds looked after me as I passed him, or in still more desolate regions where the ground was dug up for the foundations of new buildings, and I had to beware of planks and dim heaps of rubbish in the yet rudimentary streets. Sometimes, in these walks, I have found myself beyond the built limits altogether, out in the open roads, between fields and trees, where if any watchman was met it was a mounted one; and I am not sure but, of all my nocturnal rambles, these occasional penetrations of the absolute outer blackness linger most powerfully in my memory. From them I think it is that I have picked up a strange superstition about trees.

Whether it is because, as one walks in a road at night bordered by fields, the nearer trees and hedges flit past one in the glimmering light, and so produce an appearance of stealthy stirring among the more distant stems and bushes, certain it is that these permanent objects of a landscape by day, the quietly-rooted trees, seem to be possessed at night with a ghastly restlessness, and to teem with a life of which we know nothing. For my part, though I laugh at the fancy, I cannot, even when I am travelling in a railwaycarriage at night and look out, shake myself free from a hideous superstition, that the trees are there in the fields only while men see them, and that, in the dark hours when no one beholds, they unfix themselves from their rooted mounds, and career, in their own or in other shapes, over the shining solitudes which are then all their own, leading some haggard life of enchantment, from which the dawn recalls them to their hypocrisy of seeming rest. I laugh, I say, at this fancy; but others, I find, have had it besides myselt; and some notion of the kind, I believe, exists