hear no response in the public tone.  Duelling is over; visiting one’s relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man.  The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one’s friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a jest to precipitate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of some old parish church, horses hitched to the gravestones, and punch mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence, decay!  Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain thresholds.

The Washington poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one respect:  under the same roof, divided only by a partition and a corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate for refuge.

We passed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless women, semi-imbecile girls—­the relicts of error, the heirs of affliction—­three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong, rosy Irish nurse.  Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third upon the floor halloaing for joy.  Such noble specimens of childhood we had never seen; heads like Caesar’s, eyes bright as the depths of wells into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the complexions and carriage of high birth.  The woman was suckling them all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and walls light up as with pictures.  A few yards off, though out of hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and fro restlessly.  Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where bad cases were locked up.  The association of the poor and the wicked affected us painfully.

Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead—­those who have escaped the dissecting-knife.  Scattered about, with little stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks, we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of “Give me neither poverty nor riches!”