simply to refer to it, and adduce another instance of
this strange and short-sighted policy, which prefers waiting to
acting, and despises cheap, though timely interference with evil, and
indulges in the somewhat late, but more expensive process of
reparation.

And to begin. Imagine--unhappily you need exercise no great stretch of
the faculty, the papers teem with too many instances--imagine a poor,
woe-begone, miserable creature, destitute and friendless, without a
home, without a meal; his tattered clothing displaying through every
rent the shrunken form and wasted limbs to which hunger and want have
reduced him. See him as night falls, plodding onwards through the
crowded thoroughfares of the great city; his lack-lustre eye glazed
and filmy; his pale face and blue lip actually corpse-like in their
ghastliness. He gazes at the passers-by with the vacant stare of
idiotcy. Starvation has sapped the very intellect, and he is like one
in some frightful vision; a vague desire for rest--a dreamy belief
that death will release him--lives in the place of hope; and as he
leans over the battlements of the tall bridge, the plash of the dark
river murmurs softly to his ear. His despair has conjured up a
thousand strange and flitting fancies, and voices seem to call to him
from the dull stream, and invite him to lie down and be at peace.
Meanwhile the crowd passes on. Men in all the worldliness of their
hopes and fears, their wishes, their expectations, and their dreads,
pour by. None regard _him_, who at that moment stands on the very
brink of an eternity, whither his thoughts have gone before him. As he
gazes, his eye is attracted by the star-like spangle of lights in the
water. It is the reflection of those in the house of the Humane
Society; and he suddenly remembers that there is such an institution;
and he bethinks him, as well as his poor brain will let him, that some
benevolent people have called this association by this pleasing title,
and the very word is a balm to his broken heart.

"Humane Society!" Muttering the words, he staggers onwards; a feeling
too faint for hope still survives; and he bends his wearied steps
towards the building. It is indeed a goodly edifice; Portland stone
and granite, massive columns and a portico, are all there; and
Humanity herself is emblematised in the figures which decorate the
pedestal. The man of misery stands without and looks up at this
stately pile; the dying embers emit one spark