might have been expected to have halfway adjusted themselves to
the pressure which by day brought out all too clearly the hopeless
inadequacy of the facilities provided by the city to perform one
of its most important and inevitable functions, it was at that
early morning hour of our visit. Presumably preparation had been
completed for the busy day about to open by setting all into some
semblance of respectful order. But such was not the case. It was
impossible.

In one group, I recall, which an attendant said had been awaiting
his removal for a couple of days, the rough board coffins, painted
the uniform brown of the city's institutions, lay open, without so
much as face coverings over the dead.

They lay as they had been sent in from various hospitals. Most of
them were bereft of all the decencies usual with the dead, in
striking contrast, however, with the bodies from Bellevue, which
were all closely swathed in bandages and shrouds.

One body, that of a negro, which had been sent in to the Morgue
from a Harlem hospital, lay just as it came, utterly bare,
exposing to public view all the gruesome marks of the autopsy. I
wondered whether anything like that might be found to be the fate
of the once jovial and popular Murtha, when we found him.

I almost forgot our mission in the horror of the place, for,
nearby was an even more heartrending sight. Piled in several heaps
much higher than a man's head and as carelessly as cordwood were
the tiny coffins holding the babies which the authorities are
called on by the poor of the city to bury in large numbers--far