water--perhaps not all water. Another negro and his wife occupy another corner; a third sits in the window monopolising all the air astir. In another corner, what do we see? "A negro man, and a stout, hearty, rather good looking, young white woman." "Not sleeping together?" "No, not exactly that--there is no bed in the room--no chair--no table--no nothing--but rags, and dirt, and vermin, and degraded, rum degraded, human beings--men and women with just such souls as animate the highest and proudest in the land." "Who is this man?" "Dat am Ring-nosed Bill." "Is that his wife?" "Well, I don't know that. He calls her his woman." "And she lives with him as his wife--you all live here together in this room?" "Well, we is got nowhere else to live. Poor folks can't lib as rich ones do--hab to pay rent--pretty hard to do that alone." "How much rent for this room?" "Seventy-five cents a week, ebry time in advance." "Who is this man?" "They calls me Snaky Jo. 'Spose may be my name is Jo Snaky. Don't know rightly." "What do you do for a living?" "Well, mighty hard to tell dat, dat am fact, massa. Picks up a job now and then. Mighty hard times though--give poor man a lift, massa." "Is that man and woman drunk." "Well, 'spose am, little tossicated." "A little intoxicated! They are dead drunk, lying perfectly unconscious, in each other's _emesis_, upon the bare floor. The atmosphere of this room is enough to breed contagion, and sicken the whole neighborhood, and would, but that the whole neighborhood is equally bad. Let us hasten down to the open air of the court--it is but little better--all pollution--all that breathe it, polluted. Yet, in that gate of death I once lived. Look at me, James, you knew me then. Look at me now, you don't know me. You knew me a beast--you may know me a man--you may know yourself one. Sign this paper--there is a power of magic in it--and you shall go home with me, and see where I live now, and I will clothe you and help to sustain you in your sober life, just as Thomas Elting did me, and with heaven's blessing, we will make a man of you." "Too late! too late! not enough of the old frame left to rebuild." "It is never too late. Look at the piles of old brick, and tiles, and boards, and joist, and rafters, and doors, and glass, of the pulled down houses. Are they wasted? I am a mason, you a carpenter; if we cannot put them back and build up the same old-fashioned edifice, we can make a good, snug, comfortable house. Come, sign the contract, and let us set right about the job." "Father, come, father!" He turned and spoke a few low words to his wife, to which she replied: "Yes, I will. Keep the pledge one month and I will go and live with you, die with you." "Then try it, father, come." And she led him forward, just as she had done her mother. You have seen, shall see, how heaven blessed her for filial piety.