And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step they took and every breath they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it all.... The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss. A Night's Lodging BY MAXIM GORKY (A true voice of the Russian masses, born 1868; by turns peddler, scullery-boy, baker's assistant and tramp, he became all at once the most widely known of Russian writers. In this play he has portrayed the misery of the outcasts of his country. The scene is in the cellar of an inn, the haunt of thieves and tramps. Luka, the aged pilgrim, is talking to a young girl) LUKA:--Treat everyone with friendliness--injure no one. NATASHA:--How good you are, grandfather! How is it that you are so good? LUKA:--I am good, you say. Nyah--if it is true, all right. But you see, my girl--there must be some one to be good. We must have pity on mankind. Christ, remember, had pity for us all and so taught us. Have pity when there is still time, believe me, that is right. I was once, for example, employed as a watchman, at a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far from the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in the middle of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; and it was winter and I was all alone in the country house. It was beautiful there--magnificent! And once--I heard them scrambling up! NATASHA:--Thieves?