with its high enclosing palisades and espaliers hanging with tempting fruit, was visible.  The hedge which bordered on the roadside was green, and its verdure attractive to one accustomed to country life.  Bounding over the ditch which separated it from the common path, he was about to continue his walk along its margin, when his step was arrested by a sound of distress.  He looked round and saw a little boy, barefoot and thinly clad, sitting on the ground and weeping bitterly.  A little basket, half filled with chips, told what his occupation had been, while his pale face and meagre form were such as to awaken pity in the heart of the most careless.  William was not so absorbed in his own distress that he had no sympathy to bestow on another.  He stooped over the boy, and, as he kindly took him by the hand, a tear, which his own circumstances had called forth, fell upon the boy’s cheek, and caused him to look up in surprise.

“What are you crying for?” asked William; “are you afraid, or has any one hurt you?”

The little fellow only answered by questioning:  “You are crying yourself;” said he; “are you as hungry as I am?”

“Are you really crying for hunger! that is dreadful!” rejoined William.  “I know what it is not to have enough to eat, but still I never have been so starved as to cry about it.”

“Neither grandmother nor I have had anything to eat since morning, and I am very hungry.”

“But what are you doing here?” inquired our hero.

“Just gathering some sticks, to make a fire for grandmother, who is sick, and cannot spin now,” answered the boy, still weeping.

“Have you no parents to take care of you?” again asked William.  “What is your name, and where do you live?”

The boy answered that his name was Ned Graham, and named a street at no great distance from the place where they were, and which was well known to William.  He said that his parents were both dead; that while his father, who was a carpenter, lived, they had been very comfortable; but that now, as his grandmother was very old, and himself too young to do anything to help to make a livelihood, they were often hungry.  “Grandmother spun and knit until she became sick, and the neighbours still sent us in something; but they are poor themselves, grandmother says; and this morning, when old Annie Michael, who supports herself and children by washing, sent us some of her breakfast, grandmother said she could not bear to take it.”

William had no rejoinder to make, for self-reproach was busy at his heart.  But a little while ago he had thought himself “the most unhappy being on the face of the earth,” and now he could not help feeling that the condition of poor little Ned was far more wretched than his own.  His food, indeed, was coarse and scanty enough; but then he had his regular meals, while this poor child and his infirm grandmother were obliged to subsist on the charity of the poor, which could not be very regularly or liberally administered.