Henry A. Beers.
STUDIES IN THE SLUMS.
VI.—JAN OF THE NORTH.
"You're wanted at 248, and they said go quick. It's Brita, I shouldn't wonder. Lord pity her, but it's a wild night to go out! Seems like as if the Lord would have hard work to find anybody, with the rain an' sleet pourin' an' drivin' so't you can't see a foot before your face. But He will."
"Yes, He will," the doctor's quiet voice answered. "Poor little Brita! I am glad her trouble is almost over. Will you come? Remember how dreadful the place is."
"More so for me than for you?"
"Surely, for I have been in the midst of such for twenty years, and among them all have never known a worse den than that in which these poor souls are stranded. If I could only see a way out for them!"
The doctor had not been idle as she spoke, and stood ready now in thick gray waterproof and close bonnet, her face a shade graver than its always steady, gentle calm. Jerry followed, his badge of deputy sheriff hastily put on, for the alley was one of the worst in the Fourth Ward, and, well as she was known through its length and breadth, here the bravest might shrink from going unattended. Out into the night, the wild wind and beating rain seeming best accompaniments to the brutal revelry in the dance-houses and "bucket-shops" all about. Here, one heard the cracked and discordant sounds from the squeaking fiddles or clarionets of the dance-music, and there, were shouts and oaths and the crash of glass as a drunken fight went on, undisturbed by policeman and watched with only a languid interest by the crowd of heavy drinkers. Up Cherry street, past staggering men, and women with the indescribable voice that once heard is never forgotten, all, seemingly regardless of the storm, laughing aloud or shrieking as a sudden gust whirled them on. Then the alley, dark and noisome, the tall tenement-houses rising on either side, a wall of pestilence and misery, shutting in only a little deeper misery, a little surer pestilence, to be faced as it might be.