in a moral sense, raise a great hunchback where Nature made none.  He may foster a malignant temper, a grumbling, fretful spirit, which by manful resistance might be much abated, if not quite put down.  But still, there should often be pity, where we are prone only to blame.  We find a person in whom a truly disgusting character has been formed:  well, if you knew all, you would know that the person had hardly a chance of being otherwise:  the man could not help it.  You have known people who were awfully unamiable and repulsive:  you may have been told how very different they once were,—­sweet-tempered and cheerful.  And surely the change is a far sadder one than that which has passed upon the wrinkled old woman who was once (as you are told) the loveliest girl of her time.  Yet many a one who will look with interest upon the withered face and the dimmed eyes, and try to trace in them the vestiges of radiant beauty gone, will never think of puzzling out in violent spurts of petulance the perversion of a quick and kind heart; or in curious oddities and pettinesses the result of long and lonely years of toil in which no one sympathized; or in cynical bitterness and misanthropy an old disappointment never got over.  There is a hard knot in the wood, where a green young branch was lopped away.  I have a great pity for old bachelors.  Those I have known have for the most part been old fools.  But the more foolish and absurd they are, the more pity is due them.  I believe there is something to be said for even the most unamiable creatures.  The shark is an unamiable creature.  It is voracious.  It will snap a man in two.  Yet it is not unworthy of sympathy.  Its organization is such that it is always suffering the most ravenous hunger.  You can hardly imagine the state of intolerable famine in which that unhappy animal roams the ocean.  People talk of its awful teeth and its vindictive eye.  I suppose it is well ascertained that the extremity of physical want, as reached on rafts at sea, has driven human beings to deeds as barbarous as ever shark was accused of.  The worse a human being is, the more he deserves our pity.  Hang him, if that be needful for the welfare of society; but pity him even as you hang.  Many a poor creature has gradually become hardened and inveterate in guilt who would have shuddered at first, had the excess of it ultimately reached been at first presented to view.  But the precipice was sloped off:  the descent was made step by step.  And there is many a human being who never had a chance of being good:  many who have been trained, and even compelled, to evil from very infancy.  Who that knows anything of our great cities, but knows how the poor little child, the toddling innocent, is sometimes sent out day by day to steal, and received in his wretched home with blows and curses, if he fail to bring back enough?  Who has not heard of such poor little things, unsuccessful in their sorry work, sleeping all night in some wintry stair,