Reading the Police Recollections is like peering down through a crevice into some subterranean cavern, where an intense convulsive activity prevails without ceasing, day and night. The actors seem scarcely to be men and women, but such puppets as dance on electric machines, of movements too swift and sudden for human beings, too reckless, eccentric, and apparently inconsequent for moral beings. A certain phenomenal life they have, a fitful flare of gusty, fierce existence, and then the instant flicker and fading into extinction. Yet the philanthropist remembers, with a sigh, that these are living souls, children of the same Father as himself, amenable to the same laws, accountable at the same judgment-seat; and the practical question bears down upon him with ever-increasing force, How shall these outcasts of society be brought into the Father's house? More hopeless than the Pariahs are the Brahmins of our heathenism,--those miserable men whose corrupt lives are glossed over with a varnish of respectability. Church, assembly, and drawing-room see the outer surface; the police know the under side, and a sorry side it seems too often to be. The solid man of Boston bears himself loftily to wife, child, and neighbor; but the bluecoat on the corner perceives a shameful secret of crime and guilt lurking under the fair outward seeming. These are the spots in our feasts of charity. There are kind hearts for sorrow, as well as sharp eyes for crime, among our policemen, as many a deed of charity and humanity bears witness; and their varied duties bring them into contact with human nature in its oddest manifestations. At a large fire they were obliged to carry out by main strength "an old lady weighing nearly two hundred pounds, very much against her will.... When told that her life was in danger, she replied, 'It is all bosh that ye tell me. Has not my landlord repeatedly told me that the house was insured?' Kitty Quadd was very much delighted that her trunk had been found. 'It's not the value of me clothing, Sir, but it's me character that's there,--me character it is'; and, hurrying her hand into the pocket of an old dress, as she lifted it from the trunk, she drew forth a dirty piece of paper with much apparent satisfaction. 'This is it, an' sure enough it's safe it is, and it's yerself that shall read it too, for yer kindness,' said she. I unfolded the paper, and read as follows:-- "'This certifies that Kitty Quadd is a good domestic, capable of doing all kinds of work; _but she will get drunk_ when opportunity offers. "'(Signed) MRS. S----.'" _The Life of Michael Angelo._ By HERMAN GRIMM. Translated, with the Author's Sanction, by FANNY ELIZABETH BUNNETT. Two Volumes, Boston; Little, Brown, & Co.