lower
depths. Come, then! Now we are in a charnel house, for we are down
among the drunken women, the dissolute women that stew and writhe in the
underworld, for whom there is no balm in Gilead and no physician. Now we
realise what moral death means.

Like the horde of Comus they lie prone, and wallow in their impurity.
Hot as the atmosphere is, feverish though their defiled bodies be,
they call for no friendly hand to give them water to cool their parched
throats. The very suggestion of water makes them sick and faint.

But a great cry smites us: "Give us drink! and we will forget our
misery; give us drink, and we will sing and dance before you! give us
drink, and you may have us body and soul! Drink! drink!" A passionate,
yearning, importunate cry everlastingly comes from them for drink.

Now with Dante we are walking in Hell; see, there is a form, half human
and half animal, creeping towards us with lewd look and suggestion.
Yonder is an old hag fearful to look upon. Here a group of cast-off
wives, whom the law has allowed outraged husbands to consign to this
perdition; but who, when sober enough, come back to the upperworld and
drag others down to share their fate.

Does any one want to know what becomes of the wives who, having
developed a love of drink, have been separated from their husbands, and
cast homeless into the streets? Here in this circle of Hell you may find
them, consigned to a moral death from which there is no resurrection.

And the idle, the vicious, the lustful and the criminal are here too.
But we leave them, and get back to the everlasting workers, the
sober and virtuous women of whom I have told. What a contrast is here
presented! Drunkenness, vice, bestiality and crime! Virtue, industry,
honesty and self-respect condemned to live together! But let us look and
listen; we hear a voice speaking to us--

"Dear Mr. Holmes, I am deeply interested in your work, and feel one with
you in mind and heart in the different troubles of human life, and of
their causes and consequences. I feel that if only my health was better,
and I was placed in some other sphere of life, that I would do something
to help on your good work. But, alas! I shall never be strong again;
the hard grinding for a miserable pittance gives me no chance to get
nourishing food and recover my strength. Some people say to me, 'Why
don't you go into the workhouse or the infirmary?' This I bear in
silence, but it is simply killing me