der that they creep forth from the foul mystery of
their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of
their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife,
before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage;
while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the
common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that
they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It might
almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul, to observe how
Nature has flung these little wretches into the street and left them
there, so evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind
acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they
are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine? And
how difficult to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immortal
growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into this
cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I beheld the scene, it affected
me with surprise and loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I used to turn over a
plank or an old log that had long lain on the damp ground, and found a
vivacious multitude of unclean and devilish-looking insects scampering to
and fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed as much
prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous bugs and many-footed
worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of all our
heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward
to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child along with it,
and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives.
Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual of us can
reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it. The whole question of
eternity is staked there. If a single one of those helpless little ones be
lost, the world is lost!

The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their catlike rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but o