quite
startling in its effect at such a meeting; and he probably never moved
any audience so much as by the strong personal feeling with which he
referred to the sacrifices made for the Hospital by the very poor
themselves: from whom a subscription of fifty pounds, contributed in
single pennies, had come to the treasurer during almost every year it
had been open. The whole speech, indeed, is the best of the kind spoken
by him; and two little pictures from it, one of the misery he had
witnessed, the other of the remedy he had found, should not be absent
from the picture of his own life.

"Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane
members of the most humane of professions, on a morning tour among some
of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the
closes and wynds of that picturesque place (I am sorry to remind you
what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are), we saw more
poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in, in a
life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings,
reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky and from the air,
mere pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an
empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, a ragged woman and some ragged
children crouching on the bare ground near it,--and, I remember as I
speak, where the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained wall
outside, came in trembling, as if the fever which had shaken everything
else had shaken even it,--there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother
had begged from a shop, a little, feeble, wan, sick child. With his
little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his
breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I
have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in
his small frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the small body
from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite
patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he
seldom complained; 'he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'
aboot.' God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his
reasons for wondering. . . . Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have
seen since that time in London; many have I also seen most
affectionately tended, in unwholesome houses and hard circumstances
where recovery was impossible: but at all such times I have