achel W. M. Townsend in behalf of these
poor human beings, I was able to give her a bedtick and twenty-five
cents for straw to fill it, a comforter, and a place to stay in the
house with two others of the same class, for whom we have all winter
paid rental. What less than _this_ would the loving Saviour of men
have done for one like her? What less would _you_, who have battled
half a century for her freedom, have done in a case like that? She has
now a bed and comforter, _no pillow_, nor bedstead, and _not one_
garment to change with the ragged and filthy ones that have served for
day and night apparel, for bed and outdoor wrappings, the last three
months. She has no resource for bread, _in herself_, and none but God
to whom she can say, "Give" me "this day" my "daily bread". This woman
represents at least two hundred persons in every way as destitute, who
look to me for help. Another class of two hundred are in a similar
state of destitution, with this exception, they are sheltered by a
fellow-servant or distant relative, and sometimes furnished a bed, but
nothing more, and none of these can _labor_.

Two hundred more are equally destitute and as helpless, many of them
as young children, needing the personal care that patients in our
hospitals do, not excepting medical treatment and bathing. Add to
these five hundred, who under the most favorable circumstances _may_,
though do not generally, furnish their bread three months in the
summer, by picking up bones and rags in the alleys and gutters, I
believe I may safely say that out of the eleven hundred there are not
one hundred who can do this, and pay _house-rent_ beside. And it must
be remembered that none of these old people own a foot of ground in
the city, or have a home they can call their own. A few of these only
live with children, some of whom are also very old. Fanny Miner, one
hundred and thirteen, lives with a daughter seventy-two. William
Dennis, ninety-nine, lives with a daughter seventy-four. Anna Sauxter,
one hundred and one, with a consumptive son of sixty, and has slept on
an old table through the winter _watching_, as she says, two days and
a night at one time, _with no food at all_. She was one of the slaves
of Washington. Anna Ferguson, another of his slaves, emancipated when
young, lives in a wretched garret, and has no one to give her a cup of
water. She sent a child to me to-day, who said she went in to borrow
some fire of "old auntie," and found