of those cheery youngsters have an outing in the hopping season, and they come back bronzed and healthy; but most of them have to be satisfied with one day at the most amid the fields and trees.  I have spoken of London; but the case of those who dwell in the black manufacturing cities is even worse.  What is Oldham like on a blistering midsummer day?  What are Hanley and St. Helen’s and the lower parts of Manchester like?  The air is charged with dust, and the acrid, rasping fumes from the chimneys seem to acquire a malignant power over men and brain.  Toil goes steadily on, and the working-folk certainly have the advantage of starting in the bright morning hours, before the air has become befouled; but, as the sun gains strength, and the close air of the unlovely streets is heated, then the torment to be endured is severe.  In Oldham and many other Lancashire towns a most admirable custom prevails.  Large numbers of people club their money during the year and establish a holiday-fund; they migrate wholesale in the summertime, and have a merry holiday far away from the crush of the pavements and the dreary lines of ugly houses.  A wise and beneficent custom is this, and the man who first devised it deserves a monument.  I congratulate the troops of toilers who share my own pleasure; but, alas, how many honest folk in those awful Midland places will pant and sweat and suffer amid grime and heat while the glad months are passing!  Good men who might be happy even in the free spaces of the Far West, fair women who need only rest and pure air to enable them to bloom in beauty, little children who peak and pine, are all crammed within the odious precincts of the towns which Cobbett hated; and the merry stretches of the sea, the billowy roll of the downs, the peace of soft days, are not for them.  Only last year I looked on a stretch of interminable brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually rolling in upon it with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums.  There before me was Whitman’s very vision, and in the keen mystic joy of the moment I could not help thinking sadly of one dreadful alley where lately I had been.  It seemed so sad that the folk of the alley could not share my pleasure; and the murmur of vain regrets came to the soul even amid the triumphant clamour of the free wind.  Poor cramped townsfolk, hard is your fate!  It is hard; but I can see no good in repining over their fortune if we aid them as far as we can; rather let us speak of the bright time that comes for the toilers who are able to escape from the burning streets.