and when we say, Peace to their ashes! will not the reader add a fervent Amen!
On Seventeenth street was a pathetic sight. One blackened and charred wall stood swaying in the wind. Just over the door was a sign—“Plain Sewing.” An old woman had been the sole tenant. Here, any day for years past, it may be,
“With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread:—
Stitch—Stitch—Stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the song of the shirt.”
Her charred body was dug from beneath the ruins. Tragic end of a life of poverty and toil! But when we reflect on the lot of many another sewing woman, who still survives, we may, with Solomon, feel inclined to “praise the dead who are already dead, more than the living who are yet alive.”
About Thirteenth and Walnut dwelt a peddler with wife and child. He knocked a hole in the side wall of his wrecked home, and dragged out his little family over a seemingly impassable pile of debris. Then he thought of another woman and two helpless children imprisoned up stairs. He rushed to their rescue, and dragged them out just in time to save them from the flames, which two minutes later were licking up all that would burn.
Society must think more of its lonely toilers; even of its peddlers and publicans and sinners. It was the keeper of a brothel in Memphis, who, during the awful yellow-fever visitation, turned her house into a hospital, and ministered to the suffering till she fell a victim herself. Jesus was looking at some very nice people when he said, “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” To those good people, such a thing would be one of the “mysteries of Providence.”
“Mysteries of Providence” are continually ferreted out on such occasions. Reporters, to whom everything that can be written is news, gather up a hundred items and give them to the public; often grouping items in a manner that is strikingly grotesque. There is no grimmer humor than the apparently matter-of-fact statement that during a great Italian earthquake, wherein lofty cathedrals were shaken to pieces and hundreds of people killed, statues of the Virgin escaped uninjured. Sober-minded people are prone to wonder what is the relative value of a human life and a graven image. One might, if such things were of constant occurrence, consider them as meant by Providence as a very sarcastic punishment for the violation of the second commandment.
