The sole success--but it was very signal--of my winter’s work was getting a young Italian into the hospital. He had got a rheumatic trouble of the heart from keeping a _stendio_ in a cellarway, and when I saw him I thought it would be little use to get him into the hospital. The young doctor who had charge of him, and whom I looked up, was of the same mind. But I could not help trying for him; and when the sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of all) said he could be received, I made favor for an ambulance to carry him to it. It was a beautiful white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the ambulance would call; the sky was blue overhead, the canaries sang in their cages along the street. I left all this behind when I entered the dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful _poverty-smell_ struck the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen); but when I passed into his room, he clutched himself up from the bed, and stretched his arms toward me with gasps of “_Lo spedale, lo spedale!_” The spring, the coming glory of this world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital he wanted; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of our conditions, the hospital is the best we have to give. To be sure, there is also the grave. THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. It scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has been Banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained as summerlike as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety; there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach; the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain fiction of the calendar had reported itself in the human consciousness; and as men are the prey of superstition and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September. I.