It is not strange that many in this world of misery become embittered against society; that they sometimes learn to hate all who live in comfort, and who represent the established order of things, and from the rank of the patient, uncomplaining struggler descend to a lower zone, where the moral nature is eclipsed by degradation and crime, and life takes on a deeper shade of horror. This class of people exist on the brink of a precipice. Socially, they may be likened to the physical condition of Victor Hugo's Claude Frollo after Quasimodo had hurled him from the tower of Notre Dame. You remember the sickening sensation produced by that wonderful piece of descriptive work, depicting the false priest hanging to the eaves, vainly striving to ascend, feeling the leaden gutter to which he was holding slowly giving away. His hands send momentary messages to the brain, warning it that endurance is almost exhausted. Below he sees the sharp formidable spires of Saint-Jean-de-Ronde, and immediately under him, two hundred feet from where he hangs, are the hard pavement, where men appear like pigmies. Above stands the avenging hunchback ready to hurl him back if he succeed in climbing over the eaves. So these poor people have ever below them starvation, eviction, and sickness. Above stands Quasimodo in the form of a three-headed monster: a soulless landlord, the slave master who pays only starvation wages, and disease, the natural complement of the wretched squalor permitted by the one, and the slow starvation necessarily incident to the prices paid by the other. Their lot is even more terrible when it is remembered that their fall carries with it the fate of their loved ones. In addition to the multitude who are condemned to suffer through uninvited poverty, with no hopeful outlook before them, there is another class who are constantly on the brink of real distress, and who are liable at any time, to suffer bitterly because they are proud-spirited and will almost starve to death before they ask for aid. Space prevents me from citing more than one illustration of this character. In an apartment house we found an American woman with a babe two weeks old and a little girl. The place was scrupulously clean, something very rare in this zone of life. The woman, of course, was weak from illness and, as yet, unable to take in any work to speak of. Her husband has been out of employment for a few weeks, but had just shipped on board a sailing vessel for a cruise of several months. The woman did not intimate that they were in great need, as she hoped to soon be enabled to make some money, and the portion of her husband's wages she was allowed to draw, paid the rent. A week ago, however, the little girl came to the Bethel Mission asking for a loaf of bread. "We have had nothing to eat since Monday morning," she said, "and the little baby cries all the time because mamma can give it no milk." It was Wednesday evening when the child visited the Mission.