rom Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had--the
onward sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
if the law lack the power to reach it.

Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
which still greater shoals are--I was going to say housed, but that would
have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
blinking in the sun--content with life as they find it. If they are not a
very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper--Italian, of course--for a
lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
crowded as it was, it is still the old slum.