ut even from the street. Comfort is here out of the
question; common decency has been rendered impossible; and the horrible
brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated,--but on a
larger scale. And yet this is a fair specimen. And for such hideous and
necessarily demoralizing habitations,--for two rooms, stench,
indecency, and gloom, the poor family pays--and the rich builder
receives--_"thirty-five per cent, annually on the cost of the
apartments!"_

When a city has half a million of inhabitants who _must_ content
themselves with such quarters as these, which, even the beasts of the
field would perish in, does any man wonder that 18,000 women were
arrested in the last year? that in the three months ending January
31st, 1859, 13,765 arrests were made by the city police, of which over
one-third were females, one in six under twenty years of age, and more
than one-half under thirty? that in 1855 there was one death in every
26-1/3 of the population? that in 1858 the five city dispensaries were
called on to treat (gratuitously) 65,442 infant patients? that, in 1855,
1,938 infants were stillborn, and 6,390, or 1 in 99 of the population,
did not live the first year out? while, at the present time, 20,000
children roam the streets, and never enter a schoolroom? With such
homes, is there cause for surprise that husbands murder their wives?
that mothers abuse their children,--and would kill them, too, were they
not profitable little slaves, as Mr. Halliday shows? that men and women
live in drunken stupor upon the spoils of young children,--often not
their own,--sent out to beg, to steal, or do worse yet? that even the
very fag-end of humanity, the sentiment of "honor among thieves,"
perishes here?

For twenty years, Mr. Halliday has labored among these poor creatures,
as the "agent" or missionary of the "American Female Guardian Society
and Home for the Friendless," an association of noble-minded and
unusually practical men and women. If any of our readers fear lest the
fountain of benevolence may dry up within him, we commend Mr. Halliday's
book to his perusal. He will find there some little stories which have a
pathos beyond tears; some facts--happening, mayhap, within ten minutes'
walk of his own fireside--quite as strange as the strangest fiction of
Mr. Cobb or Mr. Emerson Bennett. We have not space left for any account
of Mr. Halliday's labors. His Society provides not only boys and girls,
but even men an