I will relate an incident which occurred, some time since, at the House of Industry, and which serves as a fair sample of daily occurrences there.
One morning an aged lady, of respectable appearance, called at the Mission House and inquired for Mr. Pease. She was told that he was engaged, and asked if some one else would not do as well. She said, respectfully, “No; my business is with him; I will wait, if you please, till he can see me.”
Mr. Pease immediately came in, when the old lady commenced her story:—
“I come, sir,” said she, “in behalf of a poor, unfortunate woman and three children. She is living now”—and the tears dropped over her wrinkled face—“in a bad place in Willet Street, in a basement. There are rum shops all around it, and many drunken people about the neighbourhood. She has made out to pay the rent, but has had no food for the poor little children, who have subsisted on what they could manage to beg in the daytime. The landlord promised, when she hired the basement, to put a lock on the door, and make it comfortable, so that ‘the Croton’ need not run in; but he got his rent and then broke his promise, and they have not seen him since.”
“Is the woman respectable?” inquired Mr. Pease.
“Yes—no—not exactly,” said the poor old lady, violently agitated. “She was well brought up. She has a good heart, sir, but a bad head, and then trouble has discouraged her. Poor Mary—yes, sir, it must have been the trouble—for I know her heart is good, sir. I,”—tears choked the old lady’s utterance. Recovering herself, she continued:—
“She had a kind husband once. He was the father of her two little girls: six years ago he died, and—the poor thing—oh, sir, you don’t know how dear she is to me!”—and burying her aged face in her hands, she sobbed aloud.
Mr. Pease’s kind heart interpreted the old lady’s emotion, without the pain of an explanation. In the weeping woman before him he saw the mother of the lost one.
Yes, she was “Mary’s” mother. Poverty could not chill her love; shame and the world’s scorn had only filled her with a God-like pity.
After a brief pause, she brushed away her tears and went on:—