et. Bayard street she finds lined
with filthy looking houses, swarming with sickly, ragged, and besotted
poor; the street is knee-deep with corrupting mire; carts are tilted
here and there at intervals; the very air seems hurling its pestilence
into your blood. Ghastly-eyed and squalid children, like ants in quest
of food, creep and swarm over the pavement, begging for bread or
uttering profane oaths at one another. Mothers who never heard the Word
of God, nor can be expected to teach it to their children, protrude
their vicious faces from out reeking gin shops, and with bare breasts
and uncombed hair, sweep wildly along the muddy pavement, disappear into
some cavern-like cellar, and seek on some filthy straw a resting place
for their wasting bodies. A whiskey-drinking Corporation might feast its
peculative eyes upon hogs wallowing in mud; and cellars where swarming
beggars, for six cents a night, cover with rags their hideous
heads--where vice and crime are fostered, and into which your sensitive
policeman prefers not to go, are giving out their seething miasma. The
very neighborhood seems vegetating in mire. In the streets, in the
cellars, in the filthy lanes, in the dwellings of the honest poor, as
well as the vicious, muck and mire is the predominating order. The
besotted remnants of depraved men, covered with rags and bedaubed with
mire, sit, half sleeping in disease and hunger on decayed door-stoops.
Men with bruised faces, men with bleared eyes, men in whose every
feature crime and dissipation is stamped, now drag their waning bodies
from out filthy alleys, as if to gasp some breath of air, then drag
themselves back, as if to die in a desolate hiding-place. Engines of
pestilence and death the corporation might see and remove, if it would,
are left here to fester--to serve a church-yard as gluttonous as its own
belly. The corporation keeps its eyes in its belly, its little sense in
its big boots, and its dull action in the whiskey-jug. Like Mrs. Swiggs,
it cannot afford to do anything for this heathen world in the heart of
home. No, sir! The corporation has the most delicate sense of its
duties. It is well paid to nurture the nucleus of a pestilence that may
some day break out and sweep over the city like an avenging enemy. It
thanks kind Providence, eating oysters and making Presidents the while,
for averting the dire scourge it encourages with its apathy. Like our
humane and very fashionable preachers, it contents