ng a dollar a
week for herding with the rats. One of them, a red-faced German, was a
philosopher after his kind. He did not trouble himself to get up, when I
looked in, but stretched himself in his bed,--it was high
noon,--responding to my sniff of disgust that it was "sehr schoen! ein
bischen kalt, aber was!" His neighbor, a white-haired old woman, begged,
trembling, not to be put out. She would not know where to go. It was out
of one of these houses that Fritz Meyer, the murderer, went to rob the
poor box in the Redemptorist Church, the night when he killed policeman
Smith. The policeman surprised him at his work. In the room he had
occupied I came upon a brazen-looking woman with a black eye, who
answered the question of the officer, "Where did you get that shiner?"
with a laugh. "I ran up against the fist of me man," she said. Her
"man," a big, sullen lout, sat by, dumb. The woman answered for him that
he was a mechanic.

"What does he work at?" snorted the policeman, restraining himself with
an effort from kicking the fellow.

She laughed scornfully, "At the junk business." It meant that he was a
thief.

Young men, with blotched faces and cadaverous looks, were loafing in
every room. They hung their heads in silence. The women turned their
faces away at the sight of the uniform. They cling to these wretches,
who exploit their starved affections for their own ease, with a grip of
desperation. It is their last hold. Women have to love something. It is
their deepest degradation that they must love these. Even the wretches
themselves feel the shame of it, and repay them by beating and robbing
them, as their daily occupation. A poor little baby in one of the rooms
gave a shuddering human touch to it all.

The old houses began it, as they began all the tenement mischief that
has come upon New York. But the opportunity that was made by the
tenant's need was not one to be neglected. In some of the newer
tenements, with their smaller rooms, the lodger is by this time provided
for in the plan, with a special entrance from the hall. "Lodger" comes,
by an easy transition, to stand for "family." One winter's night I went
with the sanitary police on their midnight inspection through a row of
Elizabeth Street tenements which I had known since they were built,
seventeen or eighteen years ago. That is the neighborhood in which the
recent Italian immigrants crowd. In the house which we selected for
examination, in all respects