akes me faithless to my own better perceptions; and yet I
have seen girls in these wretched streets, on whose virgin purity, judging
merely from their impression on my instincts as they passed by, I should
have deemed it safe, at the moment, to stake my life. The next moment,
however, as the surrounding flood of moral uncleanness surged over their
foot-steps, I would not have staked a spike of thistle-down on the same
wager. Yet the miracle was within the scope of Providence, which is
equally wise and equally beneficent, (even to those poor girls, though I
acknowledge the fact without the remotest comprehension of the mode of
it,) whether they were pure or what we fellow-sinners call vile. Unless
your faith be deep-rooted and of most vigorous growth, it is the safer way
not to turn aside into this region so suggestive of miserable doubt. It
was a place "with dreadful faces thronged," wrinkled and grim with vice
and wretchedness; and, thinking over the line of Milton here quoted, I
come to the conclusion that those ugly lineaments which startled Adam and
Eve, as they looked backward to the closed gate of Paradise, were no
fiends from the pit, but the more terrible foreshadowings of what so many
of their descendants were to be. God help them, and us likewise, their
brethren and sisters! Let me add, that, forlorn, ragged, care-worn,
hopeless, dirty, haggard, hungry, as they were, the most pitiful thing of
all was to see the sort of patience with which they accepted their lot, as
if they had been born into the world for that and nothing else. Even the
little children had this characteristic in as perfect development as their
grandmothers.

The children, in truth, were the ill-omened blossoms from which another
harvest of precisely such dark fruitage as I saw ripened around me was to
be produced. Of course, you would imagine these to be lumps of crude
iniquity, tiny vessels as full as they could hold of naughtiness; nor can
I say a great deal to the contrary. Small proof of parental discipline
could I discern, save when a mother (drunken, I sincerely hope) snatched
her own imp out of a group of pale, half-naked, humor-eaten abortions that
were playing and squabbling together in the mud, turned up its tatters,
brought down her heavy hand on its poor little tenderest part, and let it
go again with a shake. If the child knew what the punishment was for, it
was wiser than I pretend to be. It yelled, and went back to its playmates