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STRANGERS YET.
(A Suggestion for the Season.)

IN many a dreary and desolate place has our Annual Guest in his travellings found him,
In Tartar steppes, and in Lapland wilds, in fenny flats where the wild-fowl cluster;
In snowy wastes where the frozen watch from the “Crow’s Nest” gloomily gazes round him,
And where on the edge of the Arctic pack the ice-bound wanderers mutely muster,
But where and when and in what chill clime has he ever chanced on a scene so cheerless
As this of the opulent City’s slums, from our pallid sun by the brick-bulks hidden?
A scene to soften the cynic soul, to moisten eyes that are mostly tearless
And bring the cry of a bitter shame to laughter-loving red lips unbidden.
Good Cheer? Old friend with the jovial front, you may take your shibboleth old and pleasant
To warm-housed wealth and to humble ease, to labour brisk and to
age lone-stranded
To prince and pauper, to Cit and clown, to lolling lady and toiling peasant,
But here arc those it is strange to, strange as your bounty royal
and open-handed.
These know you not oh, snow-lock’d Sire! save perchance in pictures that tell them little,
E’en less than the show of the glittering shops, with their piled rood fare and their gilt and greenery
In which they have neither part nor lot, o which they may share no jot or tittle.
Say, genial Greybeard, what think you of our London waste and its winter scenery?
Good cheer? The dwellers in these dim courts are the Troglodytes of our Civilisation.
Tell them of sunny Italian skies, of Lakeland’s verdure, of Cashmere s roses!
They’ll understand you as well as when you prattle of Yuletide jollification.
Among them semi-starvation stalks, around them vice-curst poverty closes
A cordon stern as the lazar’s ban against the :coming of cheer and gladness,
Or if there’s aught that shall waken mirth in their palsied souls,
‘tis the liquid devil
That draws their lips with resistless lure, and wakes their spirits to dreadful madness;
And breaks as with hideous scoriac fire their life’s monotonous low dead level.
A Slum Child, Father! What do you think of this childish shape? On your rounds this morning
You ‘II meet with many a lad and a lass, their well-known visitor gleefully greeting,
What of this one though, who knows you not! Is there anything, think you, of woeful warning
In this poor, pallid and pitiful waif, your jolly old self with astonishment meeting!
Eh? Must be altered? Why, verily yes. Punch holds that same opinion—precisely.
“Peace and goodwill ‘has some meaning still, but here, FATHER CHRISTMAS, we seem to have missed it.
How to expound it to outcasts like this were good work for the Season if set about wisely.
Come carol-invoked “Merry Gentlemen” all .21&. Punch starts that work! Gentles, will you assist it?