worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of all our
heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward
to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child along with it,
and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives.
Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual of us can
reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it. The whole question of
eternity is staked there. If a single one of those helpless little ones be
lost, the world is lost!

The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their catlike rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with
the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it being too
precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit
on the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will
glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because
the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it to be in the
happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity
(all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclination
to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding herself on the
pretty ways of her ragged and skinny infant, just as a young matron might,
when she invites her lady-friends to admire her plump, white-robed darling
in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly characteristic seemed to have
altogether perished out of these poor souls. It was the very same creature
whose tender torments make the rapture of our young days, whom we love,