itate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of
some old parish church, horses hitched to the gravestones, and punch
mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence,
decay! Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend
the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain
thresholds.

The Washington poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one
respect: under the same roof, divided only by a partition and a
corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate
for refuge.

We passed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless
women, semi-imbecile girls--the relicts of error, the heirs of
affliction--three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong,
rosy Irish nurse. Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third
upon the floor halloaing for joy. Such noble specimens of childhood we
had never seen; heads like Caesar's, eyes bright as the depths of wells
into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the
complexions and carriage of high birth. The woman was suckling them
all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and
walls light up as with pictures. A few yards off, though out of
hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and
vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the
croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and
fro restlessly. Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where
bad cases were locked up. The association of the poor and the wicked
affected us painfully.

Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation
of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all
day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the
apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of
life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn
but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our
nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead--those
who have escaped the dissecting-knife. Scattered about, with little
stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of
cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the
neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks,
we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of
"Give me neither poverty nor riches!"

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