It happened that for many years (not wishing to scatter my efforts too much), I made this quarter my special "parish" for visitations; and very discouraging visits they were, many of them. The people had very little regular occupation, many being widows who did occasional "chores" in families; others lived on the sale of the coal their children gathered, or on the pigs which shared their domicile; others kept fowls, and all had vast flocks of goats, though where the profits from these latter came I could never discover, as no one seemed to buy the milk, and I never heard of their killing them. Money, however, in some way they did procure, and one old red-faced swill-gatherer I knew well, whose bright child we tried so long to save, who died finally, it was said, with a large deposit in the Savings-Bank, which no one could claim; yet one corner of her bed-chamber was filled with a heap of smelling bones, and the pigs slept under her bed. Another old rag-picker I remember whose shanty was a sight to behold; all the odds and ends of a great, city seemed piled up in it,--bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture, cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, cloths, legless chairs, and carrion, all mixed together, and heaped up nearly to the ceiling, leaving hardly room for a bed on the floor where the woman and her two children slept. Yet all these were marvels of health and vigor, far surpassing most children I know in the comfortable classes. The woman was German, and after years of effort could never be induced to do anything for the education of her children, until finally I put the police on their track as vagrants, and they were safely housed in the "Juvenile Asylum." Many a time have I come into their shanties on a snowy morning and found the people asleep with the snow lying thick on their bed-clothes. One poor creature was found thus one morning by the police, frozen stiff. They all suffered, as might be expected, terribly from rheumatism. Liquor, of course, "prevailed." Every woman drank hard, I suppose to forget her misery; and dreadful quarrels raged among them. The few men there worked hard at stone-quarrying, but were often disabled by disease and useless from drunkenness. Many of the women had been abandoned by their husbands, as their families increased and became burdensome, or as they themselves grew plain and bad-tempered. Some of these poor creatures drank still more to heal their wounded affections. The children, of course, were rapidly following the ways of their parents. The life of a swill-gatherer, or coal-picker, or _chiffonnier_ in the streets soon wears off a girl's modesty and prepares her for worse occupation.