The Old Homestead

by Ann S. Stephens

Between that portion of Bellevue occupied as an hospital and the main building lay several enclosures sparsely cultivated with flowers, but altogether possessing a barren and dismal aspect. Scattered through these enclosures were offices and shanties, some occupied by favored paupers, and others used as work-shops and for the culinary purposes of the Hospitals.

In one of these shanties a shocking scene presented itself that night. The signal for a secret carouse had been given, and the orderlies and nurses crept stealthily from their posts by the sick, and came through the midnight darkness towards the shanty. Some came slowly and at once; while others stole like gaunt wild beasts, by the high wall that sweeps parallel with the western front of the main Hospital, sheltering themselves beneath the willow trees and the deep shadow cast by the building, while with their hands they groped eagerly along the wall. They found, after some trouble, the cords for which they were seeking, each with a piece of iron at the end, that had been cast over the wall by an accomplice outside the gate. Three of these cords lay tightened across the wall, their iron ballast sunk into the turf, and with breathless haste they were drawn over each with a bottle at the end, which, as it reached the top of the wall, fell into the foul hands grasping at it.

One bottle was broken in the fall, for the man stationed to receive it was very old, and he could not see like the others. When the vessel was dashed against the stones bespattering the aged drunkard with its contents, he fell upon the grass wringing his hands and bemoaning his hard fate. The others met his grief with muttered curses, and one of them spurned the grovelling creature with his foot, showering fierce reproaches upon his carelessness.

They drove this miserable being back to his lair in the shanties, but he crawled abjectly toward them, begging to join the carouse notwithstanding his great misfortune. They would still have rejected him, but the old man had learned craft with his age, and when pleading was of no avail, betook himself to threats, which proved more effectual than his tears. Fearing that he might expose them in the morning, they consented that the old man should have a portion of their spoils, and he followed them through the darkness like a lame old hound that takes his food greedily, though beaten by the hand that gives it.

A cooking-stove stood in the shanty, with a pine table and some stools. Upon the stove was a metal lamp burning dimly and emitting a cloud of smoke. One end of the table held a tin candlestick, where a meagre tallow-candle swaled away in the socket, and the table was littered with fragments of food in little round pans. An iron spoon or two, with three or four tin cups, lay amid this confusion. Around this table hovered half a dozen women nearly intoxicated with brandy supplied by the nurses, from number ten.

In this state was the shanty when the two orderlies came in, hugging the great black bottles to their bosoms, followed by the old pauper, who still muttered discontentedly at his loss.

Then began the carouse in earnest! The tin cups were filled again and again—the earthen pitchers circulated from lip to lip—like wild animals, they devoured the fragments stolen from the convalescent patients, and swallowed the stimulants, of which they had plundered the dying not a stone's throw off; pipes and tobacco were produced, the women smoking fiercely like the men; while ribald jests and muttered curses rose through the foul smoke.

And these were the persons provided by a law of New York City for the sick poor—these fierce women, reeling to and fro like fiends amid the smoke, making sport of pain, joking about coffins—laughing with drunken glee over the death throes they had witnessed. These were the nurses a great and rich city gave to its poor—merciful economy—sweet, beautiful humanity!

And there sat those gentle children in the fever wards so wickedly deserted. From time to time Isabel parted the violet lips of her poor mother, and forced through them the liquid fraud that was so cruelly deceiving them. Mary went from bed to bed administering to the dying poor, as she had done the night before; but with a heavy heart, for all that she gave them imparted no strength. She could see the helpless creatures droop and sink from minute to minute; one or two were benefited, but the rest only seemed worse from all her tending.

Mary was giving a draught of water to a young woman, who in her delirium clamored constantly for drink, when Isabel stole softly to her side. The child was very pale, and her large eyes dilated with terror. She took hold of Mary's dress and pulled it.