The elder people doubtless appreciate the blessings of the hospital as much as the children. The poor generally speak in the highest terms of such institutions. They could not, as a rule, lie ill at home; care and attention would be impossible; and for a sick person the atmosphere would mean certain death. Doctors they cannot afford to pay. The class of practitioners who lay themselves out for business in these neighbourhoods are not, as a rule, much more than nostrum and patent-medicine vendors, and their charges are generally extortionate. If you could bring yourself to imagine truthfully the condition of the sick poor without the hospitals to go to, you would see a picture of human misery so appalling that you would cover your eyes and turn away from it with a shudder. Yet there are such pictures to be seen. There are cases which, from varying circumstances, do not go to the hospital. There are men and women who lie and die day by day in these wretched single rooms, sharing all the family trouble, enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting without hope, without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains their staring eyes with the merciful film of death. It was such a case we came upon once in our wanderings, and which, without unduly harrowing up the reader's feelings, I will endeavour to describe. The room was no better and no worse than hundreds of its class. It was dirty and dilapidated, with the usual bulging blackened ceiling and the usual crumbling greasy walls. Its furniture was a dilapidated four-post bedstead, a chair, and a deal table. On the bed lay a woman, young, and with features that, before hourly anguish contorted them, had been comely. The woman was dying slowly of heart disease. Death was 'writ large' upon her face. At her breast she held her child, a poor little mite of a baby that was drawing the last drain of life from, its mother's breast. The day was a bitterly cold one; through the broken casement the wind came ever and anon in icy gusts, blowing the hanging end of the ragged coverlet upon the bed to and fro like a flag in a breeze. The wind roared in the chimney, too, eddying down into the fireless grate with a low howling noise like the moan of a Banshee round a haunted house. To protect the poor woman from the cold her husband had flung on it his tattered great-coat--a garment that the most ancient four-wheel night cabman would have spurned as a knee-protector. 'He was a plumber,' she whispered to us in a weak, hollow voice; 'he had been out of work for a week, and he had gone out to try and look for a job.' One shivered to think of him wearily trudging the streets this bitter day, half clad and wholly starved; what must have been his torture as he failed at place after place, and the day wore on and brought the night when he would have to return to the poor dying wife with the old sad story?