ite so large as the other.
This room contained a press, an old chest of drawers, a wooden box
once used for navvy's tools, three chairs, a stool, and some cooking
utensils. When, therefore, one little Ginx had curled himself up under a
blanket on the box, and three more had slipped beneath a tattered piece
of carpet under the table, there still remained five little bodies to be
bedded. For them an old straw mattress, limp enough to be rolled up and
thrust under the bed, was at night extended on the floor. With this,
and a patchwork quilt, the five were left to pack themselves together as
best they could. So that, if Ginx, in some vision of the night, happened
to be angered, and struck out his legs in navvy fashion, it sometimes
came to pass that a couple of children tumbled upon the mass of
infantile humanity below.

Not to be described are the dinginess of the walls, the smokiness of the
ceilings, the grimy windows, the heavy, ever-murky atmosphere of these
rooms. They were 8 feet 6 inches in height, and any curious statist can
calculate the number of cubic feet of air which they afforded to each
person.

The other side of the street was 14 feet distant. Behind, the backs of
similar tenements came up black and cowering over the little yard of
Number Five. As rare, in the well thus formed, was the circulation of
air as that of coin in the pockets of the inhabitants. I have seen the
yard; let me warn you, if you are fastidious, not to enter it. Such
of the filth of the house as could not, at night, be thrown out of the
front windows, was there collected, and seldom, if ever, removed. What
became of it? What becomes of countless such accretions in like places?
Are a large proportion of these filthy atoms absorbed by human creatures
living and dying, instead of being carried away by scavengers and
inspectors? The forty-five big and little lodgers in the house were
provided with a single office in the corner of the yard. It had once
been capped by a cistern, long since rotted away--

* * * * *

The street was at one time the prey of the gas company; at
another, of the drainage contractors. They seemed to delight in turning
up the fetid soil, cutting deep trenches through various strata of
filth, and piling up for days or weeks matter that reeked with vegetable
and animal decay. One needs not affirm that Rosemary Street was not so
called from its fragrance. If the Ginxes and their neighbors preserved
any semblance of