nd isn't quite
equal to more of this conversation this morning. The next time I come
this way we shall both be more like our natural selves."

With that I tightened my cotton gloves, took up my satchel, and left
that house, feeling that I had paved the way to a good work hereafter.

V.

POOR CHILDREN.

Are there no genuine children among the poor of New York?

Beloved sisters, your question wrings the heart in my bosom. I asked it
of myself this very morning, and resolved to investigate.

I hadn't found a child that could be called a child outside a
perambulator, which means a little carriage pushed by an Irish girl,
with a cap on, along the avenues. So I took my mission down among the
tenement-houses. There I found young ones on the sidewalks, the
doorsteps, and in the gutters, thick as grasshoppers in a dry pasture
lot, all hard at work, trying to play. But the play seemed more like
fighting than fun. Two girls stopped me on the sidewalk, swinging the
dirty end of a rope, while another tried to jump it, but only tripped
up, and went at it again. Shaking her loose hair, and--yes, I say it
with tears in my eyes--swearing at the other two.

I laid my hand on her head, and gently expostulated. She was a little
mite of a girl, with a sharp, knowing face. The first word she spoke
made my nerves creep. Why, that little thing had the wickedness of an
old sinner on her baby mouth, and couldn't speak it out plain yet.

Oh! my dear sister, and you, my friend, in the great course of infinite
progress and general perfection, had you been with me, almost
broken-hearted among that rabble of children, who will never, never know
what childhood is, the last pound of butter and dozen of eggs in our
village would be freely given to support my mission here. Barefooted,
bareheaded, barelegged, and, it seemed to be, bare of soul, these little
wretches swarmed around me when I kindly asked the baby girls not to
swear, all making faces at me. The boys, that sat with their feet in the
gutters, flung away the oyster-shells and lobster claws they had just
raked from an ash-barrel, and began to hoot at me. One little
wretch--forgive me for calling names--not more than five years old, had
a cigar in his mouth half as long as his own arm. When I stooped down to
take it from him, he gave a great puff right into my eyes, and scampered
off, with his dirty fingers twirling about his face like the handle of a
coffee-mill.

As a New En