Attended by police officers, we once paid a visit to a building called the Old Brewery, which infests the city of New York as does a cancer the bosom of a splendid woman. At the time in question, it was a very large and rickety affair, and the _home_ of about _eighty pauper families_; and we verily believe contained more unalloyed suffering than could have been found in any other building in the United States. It belonged to the city, and was rented by a woman, who, in her turn, rented it out by piecemeal to the paupers. For many years it was a dram shop or a college for the education of drunkards, and it is now the comfortless hospital or dying-place of those drunkards and their descendants. We visited this spot at midnight, and were lighted on our way by torches which we carried in our hands. Having passed through a place called Murderer’s Alley (on account of the many murders committed there), our leading officer bolted into a room, where was presented the following spectacle. The room itself was more filthy than a sty. In the fireplace were a few burning embers, above which hung a kettle, tended by a woman and her daughter. It contained a single cabbage, and was all they had to eat, and the woman told us she had not tasted food for twenty-four hours. The wretched being, it appears, had been engaged in a fight with some brute of a man, who had so severely bruised her face that one whole side was literally black and blue. We asked her some questions and alluded to her young daughter. She replied to our inquiries, and then burst into tears, and wept as if her heart was broken. The only comment which the daughter made was, “Mother, what are you crying about? Don’t make a fool of yourself. Tears will not wipe away God’s curse.” The couch to which this pair of women were to retire after their midnight meal, was a pallet of straw, wet with liquid mud that came oozing through the stone walls of the subterranean room. This woman told us that her husband was in the State prison, and that she was the mother of seven daughters, all of whom but the one present had died in girlhood, utterly abandoned to every vice. “Yes,” added the woman, “and I hope that me and my Mary will soon join them; there can be no worse hell than the one we are enduring.” She mourned over her unhappy fate, and looked upon vice as a matter of necessity—for they could not starve.