ello, "are great sores;" and if the envious
and discontented poor know little of the splendid misery of the fancied
rich,--of the number of aching heads and hearts upon beds of
down,--much less do the truly rich, living within great cities, and the
world at large without them,--know of the wretchedness and the crime,
the poverty and the woe, to be found in the great and crowded marts of
trade and commerce in every country. Were mankind, in general, better
informed upon these particulars, there would be less of envy in the
world, and less of poverty. There would likewise be fewer people "well
to do" in the country, crowding to the cities, to become beggars, and
at last either to find dishonorable graves, or, when honestly dead, to
merit the Italian inscription upon a well man who took physic--"I was
well--I wished to be better--and here I am."

During the five years immediately succeeding the catastrophe recorded
at the close of the last chapter, I neither saw, nor heard a syllable
from, the subject of this narrative. The winter of 1827-28, was one of
extraordinary severity in New-York. The month of January, in
particular, was unusually tempestuous and severe. Those of the common
poor, who had been the most improvident and reckless when they should
have husbanded their earnings, were brought upon the public bounty
considerably earlier than usual, and backs "hanging in ragged misery"
were already more plenty than was wont.

It was on a bitterly cold Saturday morning of that month, that my old
and unfortunate friend presented himself in my office--but alas how
changed! He looked exceedingly dejected and poverty-stricken--as though
what little of energy he ever might have possessed, had been utterly
extinguished by the withering touch of penury. A single glance of
course served to show that matters had gone hard with him--and that if
"the world owed him a living," as he was formerly wont to boast, it was
turning him off with a very scanty one. A storm, which had been
fiercely raging for several days, gave no signs of exhaustion.--The
snow, which had been falling for fifty or sixty hours--not in a fleecy
shower, but mingled with cutting particles like hail--filled the
atmosphere, and with each successive gust of a stiff northwester, was
whirled aloft in vast curling sheets and wreaths--or driven through the
narrow streets with a force that was blinding and almost irresistible.
Nor man nor beast ventured forth, save from dir