would meet him in the way and shock his fine
sensibilities. He was willing to work for the downcast, the wronged, the
suffering and the vile, but preferred doing so at a distance, and not in
immediate contact. Thus it happened that, although one of the managers
of the Briar street mission and familiar with its work in a general way,
he had never been at the mission-house--had never, in fact, set his foot
within the morally plague-stricken district in which it stood. He had
often been urged to go, but could not overcome his reluctance to meet
humanity face to face in its sadder and more degraded aspects.

Now a necessity was upon him, and he had to go. It was about ten o'clock
in the morning when, at almost a single step, he passed from what seemed
paradise to purgatory, the sudden contrast was so great. There were but
few persons in the little street; where the mission was situated at that
early hour, and most of these were children--poor, half-clothed, dirty,
wan-faced, keen-eyed and alert bits of humanity, older by far than their
natural years, few of them possessing any higher sense of right and
wrong than young savages. The night's late orgies or crimes had left
most of their elders in a heavy morning sleep, from which they did
not usually awaken before midday. Here and there one and another came
creeping out, impelled by a thirst no water could quench. Now it was a
bloated, wild-eyed man, dirty and forlorn beyond description,
shambling into sight, but disappearing in a moment or two in one of the
dram-shops, whose name was legion, and now it was a woman with the
angel all gone out of her face, barefooted, blotched, coarse, red-eyed,
bruised and awfully disfigured by her vicious, drunken life. Her steps
too made haste to the dram-shop.

Such houses for men and women to live in as now stretched before
his eyes in long dreary rows Mr. Dinneford had never seen, except in
isolated cases of vice and squalor. To say that he was shocked would but
faintly express his feelings. Hurrying along, he soon came in sight of
the mission. At this moment a jar broke the quiet of the scene. Just
beyond the mission-house two women suddenly made their appearance, one
of them pushing the other out upon the street. Their angry cries rent
the air, filling it with profane and obscene oaths. They struggled
together for a little while, and then one of them, a woman with gray
hair and not less than sixty years of age, fell across the curb with