CHAPTEE  XV.

A DAY IN A FREE DISPENSARY — RELIEVING THE SUFFERING
POOR —MISSION ART NURSES AND THEIR WORK —A TOUCH¬
ING STORY.

From Hod-Carrying to Aldermen — Leavening the Whole Lump — A Great
Charity — Filthy but Thrifty — A Day at the Eastern Dispensary —
Diseases Springing from Want and Privation — A Serious Crowd — Sift¬
ing out Impostors — The Children's Doctor — Forlorn Faces — A Doomed
Family — A Scene on the Stairs — Young Roughs and Women with
Blackened Eyes — A Labor of Love — Dread of Hospitals— "They Cut
You Open Before the Breath is out of Your Body " — The Black Bot¬
tle — Sewing up a Body and Making a Great Pucker in the Seam — A
Missionary Nurse — A Tale of Destitution, Sickness, and Death — A
Pathetic Appeal — A Starving  Family — Just in  Time — Heartbroken

— A Fight with Death—"Work  is all I Want"—A Merciful Release

— Affecting Scenes — A Ceaseless Vigil.

IN the lower wards of the city is concentrated the strange
foreign life that gives New York its title of " cosmopoli¬
tan." One might even say that these streets with their always
flowing tide of humanity, a procession never ending and never
ceasing its march, Y-as simply the continuation of that begun
in the middle ages, of which Michelet says that they presented
the spectacle only of a vast funeral pile, on which mounted
successively Jew, Saracen, Catholic, and Protestant.

We do not burn the people, but we do stifle and poison
them in the tenement-houses which are the disgrace of the city.
In the old days — say flfty or sixty years ago — these streets
were quiet shaded places filled with the homes of the well-to-
do. First came the Irish, and the Americans fled before them.
Presently the new-comers vacated the tenement-houses for bet¬
ter quarters a little farther up, and as they left hod-carrying
and kindred employments, and developed into the rulers of the
city, they ascended still farther, till now Fifth Avenue knows

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