INTERESTING

Tales and Incidents,

FOR THE

Sea-side or Fire-side.

Edinburgh:

JAMES TAYLOR, 21 GEORGE STREET.

1858.

249. u.102.

Interesting

Tales, Jucidents, Zuecdotes,

ETC.

THE KNIFE-GRINDER:

OR, CASTING BREAD UPON THE WATERS.

WISE men, in their illustrations of life and manners, generally go to find their extremes in the city and in the wilderness. Politeness and the mental and social embellishments and comforts attendant upon the arts and sciences, are attributed without exception to the city, while mere physical vegetativeness, and the manifestations of a rude and savage condition of humanity, are the prescribed residents of the uncultured wilds. We do not require, however, to go beyond the moral boundaries with which the social economics of capital and labour have environed the homes of men to find the antipodes of human existence; the positive and negative conditions of life, like the points of a straight line, are to be found in every city; wealth lolling on its Sybarite cushions, feasting on its ambrosial dainties, and breathing its odour of roses, luxuriates hard by the dark and noisome caverns of ignorant, hungry, and almost naked poverty. Outcasts from the world of soul, and sense, and virtue, and home-life, and love, drag on a weary load of proscribed debasement and suffering within the demesne of religion, and beneath the eyes of charity; while the former stretches her gentle helping hand to raise the darkling savage, and the latter looks with her tearful, dove-like eyes across the sea to men in pathless wilds, without seeming to know that there is a moral wilderness at home, peopled with types of poor humanity, more distant from heaven's light and radiance than

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