upon the stove and no one had cared enough to carry her to the hospital.  She exclaimed, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, can’t you give me a glass of gin?” A half eaten crust lay by her and a cold potato or two, but the irresistible thirst clamored for relief before either pain or hunger.  “Good woman,” said my friend, “where’s Mose?” “Here he is.”  A heap of rags beside her was uncovered, and there lay the sleeping face of an old negro, apparently of fifty.  In nearly every garret we entered practical amalgamation was in fashion.  The superintendent told me that the negroes were fifty per cent. in advance of the Irish as to sobriety and decency.  Descending from the garret we entered a crowded cellar.  The boy’s lantern shone on the police officer’s cap and buttons.  A crash was heard, and the window at the opposite end of the cellar was shattered and a mass of riddled glass fell on the floor.  “Poor fool!” exclaimed the policeman, “he thinks we are after him, but I will have him before morning.”  From these sickening scenes of squalor, misery and crime what a relief it was for us to return to the House of Industry, with its neat school room and its capacious chapel and its row of little children marching up to their little beds.  It was like going into the light-house after the storm.

I have drawn this pen picture of but a part of the shocking revelations of that night, not only that my readers may know what kind of work I often engaged in during my New York pastorate, but that they may also know what kind of city I labored in.  New York is not to-day in sight of the millennium; it still has a fearful amount of vice and heathenism; and the self-denying men who are conducting the “University Settlement,” and the Christ-serving “King’s Daughters,” who are giving their lives to the salvation of the poor in the Seventh Ward are doing as apostolic a work as any missionary on the Congo.  Nevertheless it is true that a “Cow Bay,” or an “Old Brewery,” or a “Cut-Throat Alley” is no more possible to-day in New York than the building of a powder factory in the middle of Central Park.  The progress in sanitary purification has been most remarkable.

This narrative of the sanitary and moral reform wrought in the Five Points reminds me of another good man whom the people of this city and our whole country cannot revere too highly as a public benefactor.  I allude to Mr. Anthony Comstock, the indefatigable Secretary of the “Society for the Prevention of Vice.”  I knew him well when he was a clerk in a dry goods store on Broadway, and when he undertook his first purifying efforts, I little supposed that he was to achieve such reforms.  It was an Augean stable indeed that he set about cleansing.  Fifty years ago our city was flooded by obscene literature which sought no concealment.  The vilest books and pictures were openly sold in the streets, and an enormous traffic was waged in what may be called the literature of hell.  Such a courageous crusade