I was conversing one evening with a widow woman,
while her boy was writing to her father in Italy, and called her
attention to the advantage her son had derived from our School, adding
that I still remembered how indifferently she received at first my
advices. She felt a little mortified and replied: '_Caro Maestro_ (Dear
Teacher), having never received any good from anybody, but plenty of
harm, we could not believe that all at once we had become worthy of so
much kindness. We used to have hard treatment at the hand of everybody,
had no friends; even our countrymen in better circumstances despised us,
and, to tell you the truth, we had made up our mind that we would find
charity only in the other world.'

VISITING.

"I will not attempt to give an idea of the difficulty attending visiting
in the Five Points, nor can I dwell at length on the extensive suffering
and wretchedness that have fallen under my observation. Notwithstanding
my comparative familiarity with those places, I cannot dispense yet with
a guide and a light, and, in many instances, two of both. The rickety
shanties, with crumbling stairs and broken steps, undergo as many
changes in the interior as may be suggested by the wants of the
successive inmates. The rooms have been partitioned and sub-partitioned
a good number of times, and now and then I have found even part of the
hall, and the whole thereof on top floors, taken in by new partitions.
Small wooden rear buildings are mostly tenanted entirely by Italians,
but in large tenement-houses there is generally found a good Irish or
Jewish mingling. Visiting, in the latter case, is often attended by most
unpleasant occurrences, owing to intoxicated and troublesome persons
that are usually found in the stairs and halls. But to relate some of my
experience:

"On Christmas-day (1866) a woman with five children--the oldest three
our pupils--coming from church, fell, breaking her arm and giving
premature birth to a sixth. Hearing of this sad case, I took a few yards
of red flannel and went to see her. I found the poor woman in the
deepest agony and almost frantic from suffering. Her husband kept a
fruit-stand in Nassau Street, but this accident, as she expressed it,
had entirely stupified him, and she suffered to a great extent, also,
morally, from the hopeless condition of her young family. The stove was
as warm (or cold) as every piece of furniture in the room, and the poor
pati