"LADIES: It is my painful duty to inform you of the death of my husband, Patrick O'Brien. Allow me to express the deep sense of gratitude that I and my children feel towards your Association for the assistance you have generously extended to us during the last two years of his illness. The value of that assistance has been enhanced by the manner of its bestowal. Mr. McWatters, the kind dispenser of your bounty, has smoothed to the grave the pilgrimage of a proud spirit; but for the many delicate assurances he gave my husband that your generous assistance was not charity, but the poor soldier's rightful due, the last years of his life would have been embittered by a sad sense of destitution and dependence. "My husband served the republic for nearly four years, during which service he was maimed in its defence, and died at last of disease contracted in the service. He could not have borne the thought that he and his little ones were subsisting on the cold charity of the world, and thanks to the delicate tact with which your aid was bestowed his mind was smoothed, and his last days on earth made peaceable. "Please accept the sincere gratitude and blessings of a soldier's widow and three children. MARY O'BRIEN." This scene of the poor family, with their single bed, and as they stood in their night-clothes before Officer McWatters, as, choked with mingled feelings of sympathy and a sense of the joy he was about to give them, he read, with tears, the welcome news, ought to be put upon canvas, and hung upon the walls of all the haunts of sin, the gold-room of the Exchange, the brokers' offices, bankers', princely merchants' ware-rooms, sectarian churches, and the other meeting-places of pride and robbery throughout the city, and underneath it should be written, "A chapter of our civilization in the 19th century." S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MACK AND THE VETERAN. A TOUCHING TALE--THE POETRY AND PATHOS OF BARE FEET. The following, taken from the New York Dispatch of October 16, 1870, is not only to the point as illustrating the noble traits of Officer McWatters' character, but is too well told not to be preserved here. We think best to make no substitution of "McWatters" in the place of the familiar _sobriquet_ by which the genial writer was pleased to designate him. In one of the big public institutions set apart for a branch of the Municipal Government of this big, overgrown city of ours, there is one, among the many departments of this, that, and the other thing, presided over by our friend Mr. Mack.