That man who has done more to reform that den of crime, the Five Points of New-York, than all the Municipal Authorities of this Police-hunting, and Prison-punishing city, where misfortune is deemed a crime, or the unfortunate driven to it, by the way they are treated with harsh words, damp cells--death cells--and cold prison-bars, instead of being reformed, or strengthened in their resolution to reform, by kind words; means to earn food, rather than forced to steal it; by schools and infant-teaching, rather than old offenders-punishing. "Sir," said Mr. Pease, "what brings you here at this time of night, for I know there is an object; can I aid you?" "Perhaps, I don't know--a foolish whim--a little child--one of the miserable, with a drunken mother." "Come with me, then. There are many such. I am just going to visit one, who will die before morning--a sweet little girl, born in better days, and dying now--but you shall see, and then we will talk about the one you would seek to save." We were soon treading a narrow alley, where pestilence walketh in darkness; and crime, wretched poverty, and filthy misery, go hand in hand to destruction. "Behold," said my friend, "the fruits of our city excise. Here is the profit of money spent for license to kill the body and damn the soul." Proven by the awful curses and loud blows of a drunken husband upon a wife, once an ornament of society, and exemplary member of a Christian church, that came up out of one of the low cellars, which human beings call by the holy name of home! The fetid odor of this filthy lane had been made more fetid by the late and almost scalding hot rains, until it seemed to us that such an air was only fit for a charnel house. With the thermometer at 86, at midnight, how could men live in such a place, below the surface of the earth? Has rum rendered them proof against the effect of carbonic acid gas? We groped our way along to the foot of an outside stair-case, where our conductor paused for a moment, calling my attention to the spot. "Here," said Mr. Pease, "the little sufferer we are going to see, fainted a few nights ago, and lay all night exposed to the rain, where she was found and beaten in the morning by her miserable mother, just then coming home from a night of debauch and licentiousness, with a man who would be ashamed to visit her in her habitation, or have 'the world' know that he consorted with a street wanderer." "Beat her! for what?" "Because she had not sold all her corn, which she had been sent out with the evening before. Poor thing, she had fallen asleep, and some villain had robbed her of her little store, and, as it is with greater crimes, the wicked escaped and the innocent suffered." I thought aloud: "Great and unknown cause, hast thou brought me to her very door?" My friend stared, but did not comprehend the expression. "Be careful," said he, "the stairs are very old, and slippery." "Beat her?" said I, without regarding what he was saying.