The San Francisco call., 1898-12-19
RESTITUTION
 AND WANT AT
 CHRIST MAST|DE The Lidner Family Is Poverty Stricken.
STARVATION THEIR PORTION
THE FATHER OF THE FAMILY
 DIES OF PNEUMONIA.
Unless Charitable Aid Comes To-Day His Body Will Be Buried in the Potter's
 Field.

While the people of this city are bust ling about the business section of town in pursuit of appropriate gifts for friends. relatives and dear ones, there mourns lonely and poverty-stricken family almost within a block of the bright show win dows of Market street. whose only thought is directed to the fufllment of the hope that starvation may be kept from the door. Until last Thursday Hermann I.indner. his wife and three children. the eldest of whom is hardly 1 years of age, lived happily, If such a thing were possible In a one-room hovel at s401s Mission street, and strove with the world. although unequally, for paltry and miserable existence. Late Thursday night Idnduer was seized with delirium caused by d neglected attack Of pneu- monia. He was taken to the Receiving Hospital and later was conveyed to the County Hospital. After lingering at this institution for little over day he suc- cumbed to the disease, and now his body lies on a slab in the hospital morgue awaiting interment. His wife, owing to her destitute circumstances, has not sufficient money 10 defray the expense Of burying the body. and unless assistance comes to-day it will be delivered over to the city undertaken and will be inferred in the potters field. Dierk, the under taker volunteered to inter the body for $20, but on the advice of friends Mrs. Lindner was influenced to agree to accept the money, which she is urgently in need of, and have the body of her husband buried at the citys expense. However, although the money was offered by friends, 1t was not given as readily as il was volunteered and the prostrated woman is almost frantic with despair as her children have no bread and there is absolutely no money in the house. The sympathiZing neighbors in the vicinity took up a collection yesterday morning and raised sufficient money to provide a meal for the little ones and the means whereby the widow could visit the hos pital and view the remains of her hus- band.
 The hovel where the Lndner family lives and which it calls home Is a small room in the rear of a workshop at 940lk Mission street. Here the mother and three children eat, sleep, cook and in short. exist most miSerably. There is hardly any light in the place, and the sun never shines within the den. Entrance to it is effected by going through an ordi- nary plank door facing an allyway that runs parallel to the houses adjoining and extreme end is situated the room where Mrs. Lindner and her three children live. The partitions are of ordinary frail lum- Der and barely keep the cold and frost from entering within and claiming the little ones as it has their father
 Whether the people of the city and the charitable institutions which they support family is a question that can only be solved to-day with the volunteered offer of some philanthropiC person to take the body of Hermann Lindner out of the hands of the city and bury it decently in the name of charity.