lergyman, that he had
observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
green, evidently for the occasion.

This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.

[Illustration: A CHILD OF THE DUMP.]

Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
were as bright lads as I had seen anywhere. One was nine years old and
the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
environment--even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot--but were
entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The du