THE BASKET-MAKER. Ir my reader is not disposed to descend into lowly life I would advise him not to read my little book, although I could promise him that I will not introduce him into any society which might give offence to his most refined and delicate feelings. I am a basket-maker by trade, and my dwelling for many years past has been on the road between London and Hackney. When I first established myself there, my house, though built on a line with those on either side fronting the road, was so distinct from every other, that one must have called aloud indeed before one could have made a neighbour hear, even in the stillest hour of night; behind my house was all open field, and our little garden was never at that time deprived of the rays of the sun by the shadows of other houses; truly it was a pleasant spot then, and is well enough at this time; and I love it the more because it was there that I brought my dear Aly, only three days after our marriage, for I fetched her from the country as far off as Bulmarsh-heath in Berkshire; and it was there, too, where all my babies, to the number of seven, first saw the light, and from whence two passed in their tender infancy into the arms of their blessed Saviour; it was there, too, that my wife gently led me from à state of spiritual death into the light of everlasting life ;—not that I should say that she did this in her own strength, -that would indeed be asserting too much even of the best of wives,-but that she was made the means, in the hands of a higher power; and blessed indeed are those who are thus employed! And truly she had a weary work with me for some years, for I had a mighty notion of my own wit and wisdom, and a very mean one of that of other people, especially of women in general; an opinion which I had got from observing too much of the vanity and levity of many young girls in the streets, and the houses of my acquaintance, being little inclined to look inwards, and see the follies of my own heart. Yet, to speak as the world would speak, I was never a bad husband; I never drank, or spent money on myself unnecessarily; I kept a regular account of my incomings and outgoings, and if I was not always as kind and tender to Aly as I ought to have been, considering how much she deserved of me, yet I loved her dearly, and that with an invariable constancy. My house was small, having the shop and the kitchen on the ground-floor, and as many rooms on the first and second floor. When we had been in it about a year, an opportunity offered for us to take a respectable lodger, an old lady, who had known my wife from a babe; and it was then for the first time that we incurred a debt, and ran ourselves out as much as fifty pounds in buying furniture, and some other little expenses attending on the birth of our first-born, James, which happened near about that period. By dint of hard labour and much self-denial we brought the fifty down to forty in a few months; but for three years after that the debt fluctuated between thirty and forty, being sometimes down as low as thirty, and then up again to near forty; and we could only keep up our credit by shifting this debt from one shoulder to another, as it were, and by running up bills in one quarter while endeavouring to pay them off in another. Trade at that time was rather at a stand-still, and, as I have often thought on reflecting on the subject, had we not happened to take the lady in when we did, we should never have been able to muster the money for our rent; but what she paid us assisted us greatly in this particular, and yet the great debt hung like a weight of iron on my heart, and often made me break out in murmurs against Providence, which impiety on my part always brought my wife to tears. "Oh! Joseph, Joseph," she would say, "whatever you do, if you love me, if you love your children, utter not a word against your heavenly Father. Look round you; where can your eye rest but upon tokens of the Divine love? And then, my dear husband, if you consider these tokens, as they truly are, the earnest of those eternal, invisible, and all-glorious mercies which God the Son has procured by his death for those who |