of the Foreign Missions, in Centre street, she excuses herself.  How superlatively happy she would be to accompany Mrs. Swiggs.  A report to present to the committee on finance, she regrets, will prevent this.  However, she will join her precisely at twelve o’clock, at the House.  She must receive the congratulations of the Board.  She must have a reception that will show how much the North respects her co-laborers of the South.  And with this, Sister Slocum takes leave of her guest, assuring her that all she has to do is to get into the cars in the Bowery.  They will set her down at the door.

Ten o’clock finds our indomitable lady, having preferred the less expensive mode of walking, entering a strange world.  Sauntering along the Bowery she turns down Bayard street.  Bayard street she finds lined with filthy looking houses, swarming with sickly, ragged, and besotted poor; the street is knee-deep with corrupting mire; carts are tilted here and there at intervals; the very air seems hurling its pestilence into your blood.  Ghastly-eyed and squallid children, like ants in quest of food, creep and swarm over the pavement, begging for bread or uttering profane oaths at one another.  Mothers who never heard the Word of God, nor can be expected to teach it to their children, protrude their vicious faces from out reeking gin shops, and with bare breasts and uncombed hair, sweep wildly along the muddy pavement, disappear into some cavern-like cellar, and seek on some filthy straw a resting place for their wasting bodies.  A whiskey-drinking Corporation might feast its peculative eyes upon hogs wallowing in mud; and cellars where swarming beggars, for six cents a night, cover with rags their hideous heads—­where vice and crime are fostered, and into which your sensitive policeman prefers not to go, are giving out their seething miasma.  The very neighborhood seems vegetating in mire.  In the streets, in the cellars, in the filthy lanes, in the dwellings of the honest poor, as well as the vicious, muck and mire is the predominating order.  The besotted remnants of depraved men, covered with rags and bedaubed with mire, sit, half sleeping in disease and hunger on decayed door-stoops.  Men with bruised faces, men with bleared eyes; men in whose every feature crime and dissipation is stamped, now drag their waning bodies from out filthy alleys, as if to gasp some breath of air, then drag themselves back, as if to die in a desolate hiding-place.  Engines of pestilence and death the corporation might see and remove, if it would, are left here to fester—­to serve a church-yard as gluttonous as its own belly.  The corporation keeps its eyes in its belly, its little sense in its big boots, and its dull action in the whiskey-jug.  Like Mrs. Swiggs, it cannot afford to do anything for this heathen world in the heart of home.  No, sir!  The corporation has the most delicate sense of its duties.  It is well paid to nurture the nucleus of a pestilence that may some day break out and sweep over the city like an avenging enemy.  It thanks kind Providence, eating oysters and making Presidents the while, for averting the dire scourge it encourages with its apathy.  Like our humane and very fashionable preachers, it contents itself with looking into the Points from Broadway.  What more would you ask of it?