Poor laundry girls! Let their dead dust be mentioned with reverence. Had they been spoiled daughters of wealth and fashion, press reporters would have waxed eloquent of their birth, their history, their beauty, their accomplishments, their heritage. We should have heard in detail the names of their wealthy and mourning friends, and of their impressive obsequies. Magnificent monuments would have risen to mark their sleeping dust. These five laundry girls were taken up tenderly, and two or three days later, together borne without pomp to humble graves. But is not honest industry in useful avocation toiling for bread a more royal thing than silks and diamonds, bedizzening frivolity and idleness? Is there not in America many a haughty heiress, less worthy of our tears, than these? “Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure;” and when we say, Peace to their ashes! will not the reader add a fervent Amen! On Seventeenth street was a pathetic sight. One blackened and charred wall stood swaying in the wind. Just over the door was a sign--“Plain Sewing.” An old woman had been the sole tenant. Here, any day for years past, it may be, “With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread:-- Stitch--Stitch--Stitch, In poverty, hunger and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, She sang the song of the shirt.” Her charred body was dug from beneath the ruins. Tragic end of a life of poverty and toil! But when we reflect on the lot of many another sewing woman, who still survives, we may, with Solomon, feel inclined to “praise the dead who are already dead, more than the living who are yet alive.” About Thirteenth and Walnut dwelt a peddler with wife and child. He knocked a hole in the side wall of his wrecked home, and dragged out his little family over a seemingly impassable pile of debris. Then he thought of another woman and two helpless children imprisoned up stairs. He rushed to their rescue, and dragged them out just in time to save them from the flames, which two minutes later were licking up all that would burn. Society must think more of its lonely toilers; even of its peddlers and publicans and sinners. It was the keeper of a brothel in Memphis, who, during the awful yellow-fever visitation, turned her house into a hospital, and ministered to the suffering till she fell a victim herself. Jesus was looking at some very nice people when he said, “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” To those good people, such a thing would be one of the “mysteries of Providence.”