s
frequently regarded as a crime. But whether the one or the other, it
assumes here proportions which it does not reach in other American
communities. The city is overrun with those who are classed as paupers,
and in spite of the great efforts made to relieve them, their suffering
is very great.

The deserving poor are numerous. They have been brought to their sad
condition by misfortune. A laboring man may die and leave a widow with a
number of small children dependent on her exertions. The lot of such is
very hard. Sickness may strike down a father or mother, and thus deprive
the remaining members of a family of their accustomed support, or men and
women may be thrown out of work suddenly, or may be unable to procure
employment. Again, a man may bring himself and his family to want by
drunkenness. If the children are too young to earn their bread, the
support of the family falls upon the wife. Whatever may be the cause of
the misfortune, the lot of the poor in New York is very hard. Their
homes are the most wretched tenement houses, and they are compelled to
dwell among the most abandoned and criminal part of the population. No
wonder poverty is so much dreaded here. The poor man has little, if any,
chance of bettering his condition, and he is gradually forced down lower
and lower in the scale of misery, until death steps in to relieve him, or
he takes refuge in suicide.

[Picture: THE POOR IN WINTER.]

The Missionaries are constant in their labors among the poor. They
shrink from no work, are deterred by no danger, but carry their spiritual
and temporal relief into places from which the dainty pastors of
fashionable churches shrink with disgust. They not only preach the
Gospel to the poor, who would never hear it but for them, but they watch
by the bed-sides of the sick and the dying, administer the last rites of
religion to the believing pauper or the penitent criminal, and offer to
the Great Judge the only appeal for mercy that is ever made in behalf of
many a soul that dies in its sins. There is many a wretched home into
which these men have carried the only joy that has ever entered its
doors. Nor are they all men, for many of the most effective Missionaries
are gentle and daintily nurtured women. A part of the Missionary's work
is to distribute Bibles, tracts, and simple religious instruction. These
are simple little documents, but they do a deal of good. They have
ref