She did run with her great load, till she almost dropped under its overwhelming weight. Why should she thus labor--thus expend so much strength to so little purpose? She knew no other way to live. Nobody gave her remunerative labor for strong hands; nobody took those two stout boys, and set them to till the earth, or taught them how to create bread, and yet they must eat, and so they prowl about the pulled-down houses, snatching everything they can carry away--a sort of permitted petty larceny, that teaches those who practice it how to do bigger deeds; and those old timbers they split up into kindling wood and peddle through the streets.
Poor uncared for fellow creatures; working and stealing to escape starvation--living, for what?--running to escape being run over by an unfeeling driver who cared just as much for them as for so many dogs.
On they went, down Anthony street; and I followed, determined to see the _home_ of this portion of the city poor. It was but one block further--only one little space beyond this great, wide, open, railroad street, whose thoughtless thousands daily go up and down from homes of wealth to wealth-producing ships and stores, little thinking of the amount of human misery within a stone's throw of the rails on which they glide swiftly along.
One block further, and the street opens into a little, half acre sort of triangular space, sometimes dignified with the name of "park," but why, those who know can only tell, for it has no fence, no grass, and but a dozen miserable trees; 'tis lumbered up with carts and piles of stones, and strings of drying clothes, and scores of unwashed specimens of young humanity, whose home is in the dirt, whether in the street or parents' domicil.
Here let us stop and look around. A very short street, only one block across the base of the "park," runs to the right from where we stand, past the "Five Points House of Industry," to Cross street. This is the most notorious little street in New York. Its name is Little Water street. It lead from the "Old Brewery" to "Cow Bay." Who that has lived long in this city, or read its history, particularly that portion of it written by Dickens, has not heard of the "Old Brewery?" It is not there now. That awful den of crime, poverty, and wretched drunken misery has been pulled down, and in its place a substantial brick edifice, in which is a chapel and school-room, and home of another missionary, has been erected by the noble, generous efforts of the Ladies' Home Missionary Society, of the Methodist Church. The old tenants have been driven out or reformed. How different, too, are the present occupants of that large brick pile in Little Water street, from those who filled its numerous rooms before the missionary came there. Every room was a brothel or a den of thieves, or both combined. Now it is a house of prayer--a home for the homeless--a place of refuge for midnight wandering little beggar girls.