baby falling asleep amid its play, there enhaloed it the incarnation of triumphant suffering.  On the swollen cheeks of the homeless woman the night had shed its tears of rain.  There amid the wind and wet, in the darkness, alone and weary, shame-worn and sin-sodden, scorned by the Pharisee, despised by the vicious, the harlot slept and forgot.  Calm as death itself was the face of her.  Softly and gently she breathed, as does the heavy-eyed bride whose head the groom’s arm pillows.  Nature, our Mother Nature, had taken her child for a moment to her breast and the outcast rested there awhile, all sorrows forgotten, all desires stilled, all wrongs and sins and shame obscured and blotted out.  She envied none.  Equal was she with all.  Great indeed is Sleep, which teaches us day by day that none is greater in God’s sight than another, that as we all came equal and naked from the unknown so naked and equal we shall all pass on to the Unknown again, that this life is but as a phantasy in which it is well to so play one’s part that nightly one falls asleep without fear and meets at last the great sleep without regret!

But, oh, the suffering that had earned for this forsaken sister the sweet sleep she slept!  Oh, the ceaseless offering of this sin-stained body, the contumelious jeers she met, the vain search through streets and avenues this wild night, for the blind lust that would give her shelter and food!  Oh, the efforts to beg, the saints who would not wait to listen to such a one, the sinners who were as penniless!  Oh, the shivering fits that walk, walk, walk, when the midnight hours brought silence and solitude, the stamps that racked her poor limbs when she laid down, exhausted, in dripping garments, on the hard park seats, the aching feet that refused at last the ceaseless tramping in their soaked and broken shoes!  Oh, the thoughts of her, the memories, the dreams of what had been and what might be, as she heard the long hours toll themselves away!  Oh, the bitter tears she may have shed, and the bitter words she may have uttered, and the bitter hate that may have overflowed in her against that vague something we call Society!  And, oh, the sweet sleep that fell upon her at last, unexpected—­as the end of our waiting shall come, when we weary most—­falling upon her as the dew falls, closing her weary eye-lids, giving her peace and rest and strength to meet another to-day!

Ned stopped when Nellie did, of course.  Neither spoke.  A sense of great shame crept upon him, he hardly knew why.  He could not look at Nellie.  He wished she would move on and leave him there.  The silent pathos of that sleeping face cried to him.  Lowest of the low, filthy, diseased probably, her face as though the womanliness had been stamped from her by a brutal heel of iron, she yet was a woman.  This outcast and Nellie were of one sex; they all three were of one Humanity.