e was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed
through this part of the city and witnessed its sights with feelings of
disgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at the extremities
mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone as regarded
the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral
abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of
another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers in this
Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in
them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my
flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchedness
about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a
knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I not only saw but
felt in my body all that I saw.

Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more
closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were
so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the
hic jacet of a soul dead within.

As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was
affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent
spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the
ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and
soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces, and
of the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in their eyes,
that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought was
revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, for
I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. I
had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not desired
to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on as if
they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now I
found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled
souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me
from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of
the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I
fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?

I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found myself
standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of my
betrothed in Commonwealth Avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts that