the way to get the conceit and garrulity out of half-bred people is to cultivate, cultivate.

After all, the great qualities are innate, and cannot be superinduced by any external means or appliances. What can men learn? Not common sense, nor courage, nor charity, nor manliness, nor presence of mind, nor heroism. Either a man is born into these possibilities, or he is not. On these high grounds culture is comparatively a small matter. You can prime the pump, but can you add materially to the fountain? You can polish the diamond, but can you impart any new properties? The whole difference between genius and talent is precisely this capacity for culture. A pebble is a pebble, and a pearl is a pearl. Ordinary men are this or that, according to their training; but genius is genius, and there is no failure. What genius ever went undeveloped? What star never shone? You can no more rob genius of culture than you can of the air or sunlight. It is sheer cant to talk of 'mute, inglorious Miltons.' The great GOD will advise you of the fact when he sends a Milton. He will report himself. There is no contingency about it, except life and health. He is neither in the potential nor the subjunctive mood, but is a positive declaration. Most men are ad juncts, but genius is noun and verb. Culture is a great matter, but culture does not beget genius; genius induces culture.

People fancy that with like advantages they would have equalled this or

But

that great man; mediocrity consoles itself with the belief that it is only unfledged genius, and that when the favorable conditions are brought to bear it will plume itself and soar away. we move in the plane we are born in; if we are born underlings, we always remain so; we carry with us only what we have in the beginning. In the long run, and in a large sense, people get cultivated about up to their capacity for culture, and every one passes for what he is. No fine spirit goes undeveloped, for our conception of a fine spirit embraces this capacity for development. If a man is capable of great things, he will perform great things; the proof of the ability is the performance. If there is an Iliad in this or that man's head, he will some day write it out as sure as the light of the last star will ultimately reach us. Opportunity is every thing to talent, but nothing to genius, since genius implies the ability to make opportunities, as a stream its own bed.

All of which is obvious enough. Yet we do well to insist on culture. Knowledge cannot be too general or books too plentiful. Educate the masses, and we improve the blood of the race. A nation's capacity for great men and great work is increased by every schoolhouse, and meeting-house, and printing-press in the land. Thought refines and spiritualizes, and the more people think the more they extricate their feet from the mud and the slough. Impart an impetus here, and you reach the main-spring of all progress.

I.

SWASH-STREET.

TURNING off from Broadway, bright Broadway, brilliant, fascinating, teeming with perpetual life - Broadway, where the sin and guilt is hidden by the glare of everlasting sunshine, where the pavements bloom with flowers forever, and the hum of life-music is never still down from the beautiful street, with its whirr and clatter still sounding in the ear, with its ever-moving crowd still passing before the eyes, with its marble palaces still lifting their proud heads against the clear, blue sky, is Swash-street.

One minute, sixty seconds, sixty steps, one single square of twenty bouses, and the sunshine is gone, the flowers are gone. The life is still there, but the music is changed. The marble palaces have melted away upon the eye, but the sullen, tremulous swell from the great street yet comes in on the wind, singing, as it were, a second, to the Song of the slums.

Do the people of Swash-street ever go up to the great thoroughfare? Or do those who walk all day long on the gay pavement ever come down into the dank, dark, loathsome street? When the noonday sun shines the brightest upon Broadway, there is a damp, unwholesome shadow upon the broken stones and ever-abiding filth of Swash-street. There are piles upon piles of great houses and small houses: houses that stare down upon the street from the seventh story, with a newness in their bricks and a chronic dirt and disease in every seam and every unwashed, rag-stuffed window; houses that bear the look of youth in their architecture, with a sickly, uncombed, starved, and consumptive air; houses that lean half-fearfully, half-confidingly together, and seem stretching forward from the upper windows to gaze down

upon the sidewalk groups; houses that cower away up courts and alleys, shrinking from even the little breath of fetid air that comes lazily and unwillingly down Swash-street; houses whose windows and doors follow every angle, right, acute, or obtuse, and whose weather-boarding, knowing no nail for half a century, has dropped, rotting at the feet of its shivering tenants, and paid the penalty by warming their frozen limbs. And there are houses facing well up on the street, and knowing no shame, that look for all the world like masses of carrion, gone to that stage of decay that the great lazy worms crawl idly in and out. There are back-yards, and holes that once were cellars, and now lie open to the sky; back-yards where fierce rats scamper and race unblushingly-if rats ever blush-in the daylight, and scream, gibber, and fight in the darkness, until they send the news of their quarrels full into the squalor of Swashstreet. Stealthy cats, sleek with the gastronomic duty performed on stray young rats, walk lazily along fences and over roofs; and starved dogs, lacking the ability or courage to attack those living morsels that run beneath their very noses, steal up the dark passages, in a perpetual search for neverfound bones.

And there are shops, too, in Swashstreet-shops that display in their windows two, three, or more, dusty, discolored bottles, a dried lemon or two, some afflicted apples, a half-paper of pins, mixed with mummied flies, and a long-deceased roach. There are shops about whose wares there can be no certainty. If, by any chance, a sight could for an instant be obtained of the inside, it would reveal a few bars of crooked soap upon a bare shelf, a halfpeck measure heaped with povertystricken potatoes, a small pile of char

Swash-street is alive with peoplepeople that slide in and out everywhere; people with bruised and swollen faces, with bleared and bloodshot eyes, with mouldy hair, and hands that look as though they might have been soaked many days in the washtub, until they had gained all the lividity of the ablution, without its cleanliness. There is the wan, haggard man, who draws each foot after him with a long, painful effort, that shows every moment in the hard, gray lines of his face; the square-shouldered, squarehanded, square-jawed, low-browed man, whose eyes are always black, and whose brows lower threateningly over them, and whose cheek never gets well of a festering cut. He swings heavily along the pavement, touching every body to the right or left, sometimes hard enough to send them reeling over the curb. Then there is the slinky man, wearing always, winter and summer, a coarse drab overcoat, plentifully covered with stains, and with these different places burned through the skirt. And there are women in Swash-streetwomen of every age and of every clime; women in the very spring of life, with coarse, brutal eyes, with clothes drabbled and torn, clinging with a stiff, sodden look about their limbs, and sometimes a baby drawn uncomfortably on the hip, and huddled under the arm; women with mouthed filth and loud oaths; women with gray hair and toothless mouths, who sneak backwards and forwards from cellar-ways and holes with all the cunning of the rats, but with none of their daring. There is one who flies, rather than runs, across the stifling street, clutching a loaf of dingy bread with one hand, and dragging from under the wheels of a rickety fish-wagon a prostrate child. She casts a hurried glance into the face of the squalid little one whose life she has saved, and something there, amid all

of the babe she left in its cradle two years ago, when she fled, one September evening, from all that woman has to gain or lose on earth. The time is coming fast when she who is now weeping in its memory will harden her heart against that past, and lose forever the ease to her deadly pain she now finds in tears. There is one who hurries along with a bundle half concealed beneath a shawl. She is going to the pawnbroker's; and with every pawnshop in all the great city she is familiar. One year ago she scarce knew the name of such a place, but the chances are very strong that in one year she will. know worse; perhaps every drinking-shop within a mile, and every station-house from the Battery up. One year ago she abandoned home, and threw away those who had carefully nurtured her from birth, for one who spoke glibly and had white teeth and restless eyes. He was a gambler. Her friends knew it, and warned her. She believed that when she was his wife he would change. Last night he came home very 'far gone,' and a broad bruise upon her side this morning. tells the rest.

Swash-street is largely productive of children—children of every age and size, but mostly small, very small. The compilers of statistics can easily tell about the children in Swash-street; how the chances are only fifteen per cent that a child born in Swash-street reaches the age of one year, twelve and a half per cent against two years, and so on. And still, there must be wondrous quantities of children born in Swash-street, since so many remain in spite of the percentage. There they are, singly and in groups, gaunt, vacantfaced children; children with large heads and small legs; children with protuberant stomachs, and nothing in them; children with great sores upon faces that never were washed since the day of their birth; children in dozens and in hundreds, with never a toy

:

among them all; children who know no game but such as the gutters afford, or the filth-covered cobble-stones can teach those with a weird, afrit look; those who throw themselves upon the aristocracy of their position, because their fathers are in the State Prison, squalid and filthy, old in vice and want, sharpened in brain by daily contact with terror, with no past, with no future. God help the children of Swash-street! Up a dark, narrow alley, up a staircase whose banisters were long since torn away, where the walls are greasy to the touch, and well broken into holes through lath and plaster, a man is stumbling, catching at the holes to steady his way from story to story, and stopping at times to find breath for the oaths he growls out. Stair after stair, and he releases his hold upon the last break in the wall, and makes a staggering dash at a door which fails to yield as he turns a shaky handle. There is a quick step inside, but, before it can reach, the man has given the door a fearful kick, that sends it flying open, striking in its flight a pale-faced, childlike, and frightened woman.

'Why don't you open the door when I call?' was the first word spoken, in an uncertain, drunken voice.

'Don't be angry, Walter. I did not hear you call. I fastened the door because I am afraid when I am here alone.'

'Afraid, are you? Well! what's the reason you stay here then? Why don't you leave here? Plenty of places to go to.'

'O Walter! don't talk so. Where could I go without you? What could I do with the child?'

'See here, now! I've told you often that I don't want to hear about that brat. Some of these days I'll fling it out of that window. It'll make a pretty figure on the pavement there below, won't it?'

The woman made a quick step towards a box at the other side of the room,

where lay a child asleep on a scanty bed, and stooped half over it.

'Oh! you need n't be afraid,' he went on with a drunken laugh; 'I'll not do it now. Only I want you to know I'm not going to have it stuck in my face continually. Because I was kind-hearted enough to let you bring it along, must I always know it's about? Must I always have his face staring at me from his child, eh?'

'O Walter! don't speak so. Time will soften it all; perhaps it will be a help and comfort to us yet.'

'Help! who wants its help? Who wants any comfort from it? Why don't the child die? A n't they dying around here like sheep? Why do n't that die too? Then may be you'd be good for something. Now you spend all your time blubbering over it, as though that could do you any good.'

A choking, stifled sob, half of grief, half of fear, was all the response. 'There you go again! Nothing but snivelling all day long. What's a man going to do with a snivelling woman? Who ought to cry loudest, if there's any crying to be done? Had n't I? Look at me. Do I look like what I once was? Don't ye think his curse has followed me?'

'And has not his curse followed methe curse of an injured husband?' The woman bent her head as she spoke, and covered her face with both hands.

'Injured husband! Ha! ha! ha! That's the world's slang. Is a man injured because another takes from him a woman that has not faith enough in herself to be faithful to him?'

The woman was straight enough now. The blood danced and played through the veins of her pale face, and struck fire in her eyes. At first she spoke low, looking directly at the man:

'Yes! that's what I dreamed; what I have pondered on. You, who came with such art, who worked upon my weak jealousy, making me believe that he who was always kind, always gen