d moves. Never yet did
Christmas seem less dark on Cherry Hill than since the lights were put
out in Gotham Court forever.

In "The Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he
can catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of
green made of two coffins set on end. It has been a good day, he says
cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the
"good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but
gone. Where the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the
strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian
and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum
will curtail the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of
the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a
knife has been drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and
grass and green shrubs took the place of the old rookeries. The
Christmas gospel of peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves
out. It never had a chance before.

The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the music,
bareheaded and with torn shoes, but happy; across the Five Points and
through "the Bay,"--known to the directory as Baxter Street,--to "the
Divide," still Chatham Street to its denizens, though the aldermen
have rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations of Greek and
Italian children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In
one of the crooked streets near the river its journey comes to an end.
A battered door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the
creaking stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter in the sink: it is
to keep it from freezing. There is not a whole window pane in the
hall. Time was when this was a fine house harboring wealth and
refinement. It has neither now. In the old parlor downstairs a knot of
hard-faced men and women sit on benches about a deal table, playing
cards. They have a jug between them, from which they drink by turns.
On the stump of a mantel-shelf a lamp burns before a rude print of the
Mother of God. No one pays any heed to the hand-organ man and his wife
as they climb to their attic. There is a colony of them up
there--three families in four rooms.

"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant of the double flat,--the one with
two rooms,--"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand. In
the corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in
commemorati