, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.

I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
to make him work, and that is his salvation. "In seventeen years," said
the teacher of the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
night, takes in quite six hundred, "I have seen my boys work up into
decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
two I know of have gone astray." I had observed the process often enough
myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.

Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
exodus f