whole world be
cleansed, or not a man or woman of us all can be clean.

By-and-by we came to the ward where the children were kept, on entering
which, we saw, in the first place, several unlovely and unwholesome little
people lazily playing together in a court-yard. And here a singular
incommodity befell one member of our party. Among the children was a
wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, (about six years old, perhaps,
but I know not whether a girl or a boy,) with a humor in its eyes and
face, which the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared to bedim
its powers of vision, so that it toddled about gropingly, as if in quest
of it did not precisely know what. This child--this sickly, wretched,
humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it
must have required several generations of guilty progenitors to render so
pitiable an object as we beheld it--immediately took an unaccountable
fancy to the gentleman just hinted at. It prowled about him like a pet
kitten, rubbing against his legs, following everywhere at his heels,
pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all the speed that its
poor limbs were capable of, got directly before him and held forth its
arms, mutely insisting on being taken up. It said not a word, being
perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle. But it smiled up in his
face,--a sort of woful gleam was that smile, through the sickly blotches
that covered its features,--and found means to express such a perfect
confidence that it was going to be fondled and made much of, that there
was no possibility in a human heart of balking its expectation. It was as
if God had promised the poor child this favor on behalf of that
individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract, or else no longer
call himself a man among men. Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for
him to do, he being a person burdened with more than an Englishman's
customary reserve, shy of actual contact with human beings, afflicted with
a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, and, furthermore, accustomed to
that habit of observation from an insulated stand-point which is said
(but, I hope, erroneously) to have the tendency of putting ice into the
blood.

So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and am
seriously of opinion that he did an heroic act, and effected more than he
dreamed of towards his final salvation, when he took up the loathsome
child and caressed it