ived amidst it for two long years. The
acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he picked up on the
pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought to him now that the
asylum was known in the district--little boys, little girls, tiny mites
stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers were toiling,
drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the mother had gone
wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed slack times into the home;
and then the brood was swept into the gutter, and the younger ones half
perished of cold and hunger on the footways, whilst their elders betook
themselves to courses of vice and crime. One evening Pierre rescued from
the wheels of a stone-dray two little nippers, brothers, who could not
even give him an address, tell him whence they had come. On another
evening he returned to the asylum with a little girl in his arms, a
fair-haired little angel, barely three years old, whom he had found on a
bench, and who sobbed, saying that her mother had left her there. And by
a logical chain of circumstances, after dealing with the fleshless,
pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he came to deal with the
parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each day further and further
into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring knowledge of all its
frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent by terrified anguish
and impotent charity.

Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human suffering
and degradation--how frightful were his journeys through it during those
two years which distracted his whole being! In that Ste. Marguerite
district of Paris, in the very heart of that Faubourg St. Antoine, so
active and so brave for work, however hard, he discovered no end of
sordid dwellings, whole lanes and alleys of hovels without light or air,
cellar-like in their dampness, and where a multitude of wretches wallowed
and suffered as from poison. All the way up the shaky staircases one's
feet slipped upon filth. On every story there was the same destitution,
dirt, and promiscuity. Many windows were paneless, and in swept the wind
howling, and the rain pouring torrentially. Many of the inmates slept on
the bare tiled floors, never unclothing themselves. There was neither
furniture nor linen, the life led there was essentially an animal life, a
commingling of either sex and of every age--humanity lapsing into
animality through lack of even indispensable thi