the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the
hard floor, often a pile of half-finished clothing brought home from the
sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very
lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family lying lengthwise
and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except
a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his
clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It
seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all
in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital
statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even
an unusual degree of good health. The records of the Sanitary Bureau show
that while the Italians have the highest death-rate, the mortality in the
lower part of the Tenth Ward, of which Ludlow Street is the heart and
type, is the lowest in the city. Even the baby death-rate is very low. But
for the fact that the ravages of diphtheria, croup, and measles run up the
record in the houses occupied entirely by tailors--in other words, in the
sweater district, where contagion always runs riot[4]--the Tenth Ward
would seem to be the healthiest spot in the city, as well as the dirtiest
and the most crowded. The temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from
enfeebling vices generally must account for this, along with his
marvellous vitality. I cannot now recall ever having known a Jewish
drunkard. On the other hand, I have never come across a Prohibitionist
among them. The absence of the one renders the other superfluous.

It was only last winter I had occasion to visit repeatedly a double
tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed
to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not
counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was
ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its
way down there, the hatches having been carefully covered with rags and
matting; but freshets often did. Sometimes the water rose to the height of
a foot, and never quite soaked away in the dryest season. It was an awful
place, and by the light of my candle the three, with their unkempt beards
and hair and sallow faces, looked more like hideous ghosts than living
men. Yet they had slept there among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage
of all sorts from the