be called meagre. Of the
Jewish types New York has, as the printers say, "a full case."

[Illustration]

But it is on the other side of the Bowery that there lies a world to
which the world north of Fourteenth Street is a select family party. I
could not give even a partial list of its elements. Here dwell the
Polish Jews with their back-yards full of chickens. The police raid
those back-yards with ready assiduity, but the yards are always promptly
replenished. It is the police against a religion, and the odds are
against the police. The Jew will die for it, if needs be, but his
chickens must be killed _kosher_ way and not Christian way, but that is
only the way of the Jews: the Hungarians, the Bohemians, the Anarchist
Russians, the Scandinavians of all sorts who come up from the wharfs,
the Irish, who are there, as everywhere, the Portuguese Jews, and all
the rest of them who help to form that city within a city--have they
not, all of them, ways of their own? I speak of this Babylon only to say
that here and there on its borders, and, once in a way, in its very
heart, are rows or blocks of plain brick houses, homely, decent,
respectable relics of the days when the sturdy, steady tradesfolk of New
York built here the homes that they hoped to leave to their children.
They are boarding-and lodging-houses now, poor enough, but proud in
their respectability of the past, although the tide of ignorance,
poverty, vice, filth, and misery is surging to their doors and their
back-yard fences. And here, in hall bedrooms, in third-story backs and
fronts, and in half-story attics, live the Bohemians of to-day, and with
them those other strugglers of poverty who are destined to become
"successful men" in various branches of art, literature, science, trade,
or finance. Of these latter our children will speak with hushed respect,
as men who rose from small beginnings; and they will go into the
school-readers of our grandchildren along with Benjamin Franklin and
that contemptible wretch who got to be a great banker because he picked
up a pin, as examples of what perseverance and industry can accomplish.
From what I remember I foresee that those children will hate them.

[Illustration]

I am not going to give you the addresses of the cheap restaurants where
these poor, cheerful children of adversity are now eating _goulasch_ and
_Kartoffelsalad_ instead of the spaghetti and _tripe a la mode de Caen_
of their old haunts. I do not know