those
windows, from which dirty rags hang out to dry; those fetid gutters,
which coil along the fronts of the houses like venomous reptiles! I felt
oppressed with grief, and hastened on.

A little farther on I was stopped by the hearse of a hospital; a dead
man, nailed down in his deal coffin, was going to his last abode, without
funeral pomp or ceremony, and without followers. There was not here even
that last friend of the outcast--the dog, which a painter has introduced
as the sole attendant at the pauper's burial! He whom they were preparing
to commit to the earth was going to the tomb, as he had lived, alone;
doubtless no one would be aware of his end. In this battle of society,
what signifies a soldier the less?

But what, then, is this human society, if one of its members can thus
disappear like a leaf carried away by the wind?

The hospital was near a barrack, at the entrance of which old men, women,
and children were quarrelling for the remains of the coarse bread which
the soldiers had given them in charity! Thus, beings like ourselves daily
wait in destitution on our compassion till we give them leave to live!
Whole troops of outcasts, in addition to the trials imposed on all God's
children, have to endure the pangs of cold, hunger, and humiliation.
Unhappy human commonwealth! Where man is in a worse condition than the
bee in its hive, or the ant in its subterranean city!

Ah! what then avails our reason? What is the use of so many high
faculties, if we are neither the wiser nor the happier for them? Which of
us would not exchange his life of labor and trouble with that of the
birds of the air, to whom the whole world is a life of joy?

How well I understand the complaint of Mao, in the popular tales of the
'Foyer Breton' who, when dying of hunger and thirst, says, as he looks at
the bullfinches rifling the fruit-trees:

"Alas! those birds are happier than Christians; they have no need of
inns, or butchers, or bakers, or gardeners. God's heaven belongs to them,
and earth spreads a continual feast before them! The tiny flies are their
game, ripe grass their cornfields, and hips and haws their store of
fruit. They have the right of taking everywhere, without paying or asking
leave: thus comes it that the little birds are happy, and sing all the
livelong day!"

But the life of man in a natural state is like that of the birds; he
equally enjoys nature. "The earth spreads a continual feast before him."
Wha