cards the idea that one must accept evil, dam it in, and
hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a
free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and
destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one
must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them
the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment,
however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was affected,
filled with growing pity and anguish at the thought of all the crime,
all the shame, all the grief and distress that had passed through that
anteroom in which he stood. What terrible confessions must have been
heard, what a procession of suffering, ignominy, and wretchedness must
have been witnessed by that woman who received the children in her
mysterious little office! To her all the wreckage of the slums, all the
woe lying beneath gilded life, all the abominations, all the tortures
that remain unknown, were carried. There in her office was the port for
the shipwrecked, there the black hole that swallowed up the offspring of
frailty and shame. And while Mathieu's spell of waiting continued he saw
three poor creatures arrive at the hospital. One was surely a work-girl,
delicate and pretty though she looked, so thin, so pale too, and with
so wild an air that he remembered a paragraph he had lately read in a
newspaper, recounting how another such girl, after forsaking her child,
had thrown herself into the river. The second seemed to him to be a
married woman, some workman's wife, no doubt, overburdened with children
and unable to provide food for another mouth; while the third was tall,
strong, and insolent,--one of those who bring three or four children to
the hospital one after the other. And all three women plunged in, and he
heard them being penned in separate compartments by an attendant, while
he, with stricken heart, realizing how heavily fate fell on some, still
stood there waiting.

* The "slide" system, which enabled a mother to deposit her child
at the hospital without being seen by those within, ceased to be
employed officially as far back as 1847; but the apparatus was
long preserved intact, and I recollect seeing it in the latter
years of the Second Empire, _cir._ 1867-70, when I was often at
the artists' studios in the neighborhood. The aperture through
which children were deposited in the sliding-box was close to