Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most
humane members of the humane medical profession, on a morning tour
among some of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of
Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place--I am
sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus
often are--we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many
people would believe in a life. Our way lay from one to another of
the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out
from the sky, shut out from the air, mere pits and dens. In a room
in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on
the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children
crouching on the bare ground near it--where, I remember as I speak,
that the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained and time-
stained house-wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which had
shaken everything else there had shaken even it--there lay, in an
old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little
feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and
his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little
bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for
several years, look in steadily at us. There he lay in his little
frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body
from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite
patient, saying never a word.
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