down onto the level of humanity and human brotherhood."

Sez I, "Spozen you should take it to yourself for a spell, imagine how
it would be with you if you had been born there onbeknown to yourself."
Sez I, "If you wuz a-livin' down there in them horrible pits of disease
and death--if you wuz a-standin' over the dyin' bed of wife or mother,
or other dear one, and felt that if you could bring one fresh, sweet
breath of air to the dear one, dyin' for the want of it, you would
almost barter your hopes of eternity--

"If you stood there in that black, chokin' atmosphere, reekin' with all
pestilental and moral death, and see the one you loved best a-slippin'
away from you--borne out of your sight, borne away into the onknown, on
them dead waves of poisinous, deathly air--I guess you wouldn't talk
about reducin' the Surplus Population."

I had been real eloquent, and I knew it, for I felt deeply what I said.

But Elnathan looked cheerful under all my talk. It didn't impress him a
mite, I could see.

He felt safe. He wuz sure the squalor and sufferin' never would or could
touch him. He thought, in the words of the Him slightly changed, that:
"He could read his title clear to Mansions with all the modern
improvements."

He and The Little Maid wuz safe. The world looked further off to him,
the woes, and wants, and crimes of our poor humanity seemed quite a
considerable distance away from him.

Onclouded prosperity had hardened Elnathan's heart--it will
sometimes--hard as Pharo's.

But he wuz a visitor and one of the relations on his side, and I done
well by him, killed a duck and made quite a fuss.

The business of settlin' the estate took quite a spell, but he didn't
hurry any.

He said "the nurse wuz good as gold, she would take good care of The
Little Maid. She wrote to him every day;" and so she did, the hussy, all
through that dretful time to come.

Oh dear me! oh dear suz!

The nurse, Jean, had a sister who had come over from England with a
cargo of trouble and children--after Jean had come on to California.

And Elnathan, good-natured when he wuz a mind to be, had listened to
Jean's story of her sister's woes, with poverty, hungery children, and a
drunken husband, and had given this sister two small rooms in one of his
tenement housen, and asked so little for them, that they wuz livin'
quite comfortable, if anybody could live comfortable, in such a
stiflin', nasty spot.

Their rooms wuz on top of the ho