has nothing so besotted, Paris nothing so vicious, Naples nothing so dark and despairing, as this heathen world we pass by so heedlessly.  Beside it even the purlieus of Rome sink into insignificance.  Now run your eye along the East side of Orange street.  A sidewalk sinking in mire; a long line of one-story wooden shanties, ready to cave-in with decay; dismal looking groceries, in which the god, gin, is sending his victims by hundreds to the greedy grave-yard; suspicious looking dens with dingy fronts, open doors, and windows stuffed with filthy rags-in which crimes are nightly perpetrated, and where broken-hearted victims of seduction and neglect, seeking here a last refuge, are held in a slavery delicacy forbids our describing; dens where negro dancers nightly revel, and make the very air re-echo their profaning voices; filthy lanes leading to haunts up alleys and in narrow passages, where thieves and burglars hide their vicious heads; mysterious looking steps leading to cavern-like cellars, where swarm and lay prostrate wretched beings made drunk by the “devil’s elixir”—­all these beset the East side of Orange street.  Wasted nature, blanched and despairing, ferments here into one terrible pool.  Women in gaudy-colored dresses, their bared breasts and brawny arms contrasting curiously with their wicked faces, hang lasciviously over “half-doors,” taunt the dreamy policeman on his round, and beckon the unwary stranger into their dens.  Piles of filth one might imagine had been thrown up by the devil or the street commissioners and in which you might bury a dozen fat aldermen without missing one; little shops where unwholesome food is sold; corner shops where idlers of every color, and sharpers of all grades, sit dreaming out the day over their gin-are here to be found.  Young Ireland would, indeed, seem to have made this the citadel from which to vomit his vice over the city.

“They’re perfectly wild, Madam-these children are,” says Mr. Toddleworth, in reply to a question Mrs. Swiggs put respecting the immense number of ragged and profaning urchins that swarm the streets.  “They never heard of the Bible, nor God, nor that sort of thing.  How could they hear of it?  No one ever comes in here-that is, they come in now and then, and throw a bit of a tract in here and there, and are glad to get out with a whole coat.  The tracts are all Greek to the dwellers here.  Besides that, you see, something must be done for the belly, before you can patch up the head.  I say this with a fruitful experience.  A good, kind little man, who seems earnest in the welfare of these wild little children that you see running about here-not the half of them know their parents-looks in now and then, acts as if he wasn’t afraid of us, (that is a good deal, Madam,) and the boys are beginning to take to him.  But, with nothing but his kind heart and earnest resolution, he’ll find a rugged mountain to move.  If he move it, he will deserve a monument of fairest marble erected to his memory, and letters of gold to emblazon his deeds thereon.  He seems to understand the key to some of their affections.  It’s no use mending the sails without making safe the hull.”