There was no sharp transition to a region which knows no Sunday, for everywhere were the outward symbols of the day in closed shops, and streets free from the noise of traffic, and the presence of holiday garments; and yet more obvious on every hand became now the evidences of a poverty which finds no day of rest. The unemployed, in the uniform of rags, were loafing on the streets--the long, relentless waiting which is an honest workman’s torment until he finds employment, or loses hope and self-respect, when it becomes his sure destruction. Children who have scant knowledge of clean water or clean clothes were playing in the unclean streets, or emerging from the “family entrances” of saloons with pitchers or tin-pails of beer, destined for rooms swarming with workers whose labor never ceases, except for a few hours each night, unless there comes the calamity of no work at even a bare-living rate. It was the age-old picture of the lot of the very poor, which alters not with the varying fortune of the State. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” one epoch of society merges into another, and the lives of men are lived on other planes; but there is a constant quantity in it all at the point where the pressure upon the limits of subsistence is the strongest, and the weakest, driven to the wall, live from hand to mouth in squalid wretchedness. How familiar to our day has the picture come to be of children who breathe moral death with every breath they draw, and grow up to certain crime and shamelessness from out the haggard struggle for daily bread in sordid attics where disease is born in reeking filth and in warrens of beastly incest! Familiarity with it breeds no contempt, but rather a wondering recognition of the touch of better nature which reveals itself--the shouts of true delight from children hard at play; their rapt absorption in the game, an ecstasy in which all the hidden beauty of their faces is disclosed; the loving tending of a plant that grows in the fetid air of a working-chamber; and, more than all, the unfailing miracle of ministry, wherein the poor, out of cramping penury, relieve the grimmer needs of yet poorer brethren.