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great City has its mass of misery at all times. Gathered in the remoter byways are the huddled groups of humanity that have been borne down in the desperate struggle for life—the crippled stragglers out of the great battle, creeping away to die in some wretched corner. Pale mothers and puny children, left penniless by the sudden loss of one whose daily labor earned. their only support; little brothers and sisters, orphaned altogether and scarcely removed in age from babyhood, and broken down fathers thrown by illness as a burden on those whom they have barely kept alive for years—such are the classes of the city poor sustaining a flickering vitality by scarcely known devices.

South Fifth avenue is the shadow of the Fifth avenue of the rich. Rags here take the place of flowers in the dooryard, and plate glass windows are supplanted by broken panes in a dingy sash, and by wisps of straw and bundles of rags thrust into the apertures that admit more cold than light. In a rear building at No 69—a building approached by a narrow passageway reeking with filth—lives an aged pair. Their home is a den in a dirty cellar, and you have to bend low as you cross the threshhold to enter. Once in this place your first and only anxiety is to get out again, and even the black and fearful court you have to cross, and the foul alley through the winding way of which you must pass, seem inviting, when yon have for a moment breathed the deadly gas, miscalled the atmosphere, of this cellar. Grey haired and feeble, these two, a man and a woman, are slowly dying in this fearful place. The worst cell in the city prison is a sanatorium when