dollar I buy some egg. But not tea; not big loaf of
white bread dot swell and swell inside and ven it is gone leave one all
so empty. I would teach many but they like it not. They want only de
tea; always de tea."

"De tea" and the sewing-machine are naturally inseparable allies, and so
long as the sewing-women must work fourteen hours daily they will remain
so; the rank fluid retarding digestion and thus proving as friendly an
aid as the "bone" which the half-fed Irish peasant demands in his
potato. For the west side the story was quite plain, but for such
returns as the east side has to offer there is still room for further
detail.

CHAPTER ELEVENTH.

UNDER THE BRIDGE AND BEYOND.

Between east and west side poverty and its surroundings exists always
this difference, that the west is newer and thus escapes the inherited
miseries that hedge about life in such regions as the Fourth Ward.
There, where old New York once centred, and where Dutch gables and
dormer windows may still be seen, is not only the foulness of the
present, each nationality in the swarming tenements representing a
distinct type of dirt and a distinct method of dealing with it and in
it, but the foulness also of the past, in decay and mould and crumbling
wall and all silent forces of destruction at work here for a generation
and more. Those of us who have watched the evolution of the Fourth Ward
into some show of decency recognize many causes as having worked toward
the same end; yet even when one notes to-day the changes wrought, first
by business, the march of which has wiped out many former landmarks,
setting in their place great warehouses and factories, and then of
philanthropy, which, as in the case of Miss Collins's tenements, has
transformed dens into some semblance of homes, there remains the
conviction that dens are uppermost still. The business man hurrying down
Fulton or Beekman Street, the myriads who pass up and down in the
various east-side car lines, with those other myriads who cross the
great Bridge, have small conception what thousands are packed away in
the great tenements, and the rookeries even more crowded, or what depth
of vileness flaunts itself openly when day is done and the creatures of
shadow come out to the light that for many quarters is the only
sunshine. This ward has had minute and faithful description from one of
the most energetic of workers for better sanitary conditions among the
poor,--Mr. Charles Wi