grateful country he had served as
payment in full for an arm. It was enough to keep body and soul
together, and he could not complain. Nor could I; but I could and did
signify to my guide by a nod that I had seen and heard enough, and we
went down again into the slimy, reeking court."

There is a square on the East side bounded by Houston, Stanton, Pitt, and
Willett streets. It contains a group of three front and seven rear
houses, and is known as "Rag-pickers' Row." These ten houses contain a
total of 106 families, or 452 persons. All these persons are
rag-pickers, or more properly chiffonniers, for their business is to pick
up every thing saleable they can find in the streets. Formerly they
brought their gatherings to this place and assorted them here before
taking them to the junk stores to sell them. Now, however, they assort
them elsewhere, and their wretched dwellings are as clean as it is
possible to keep them. They are generally peaceable and quiet, and their
quarrels are commonly referred to the agent in charge of the row, who
decides them to their satisfaction. They are very industrious in their
callings, and some of them have money in the Savings banks. Nearly all
who have children send them to the Mission Schools.

The Board of Health, in one of their recent publications, express
themselves as follows:

"The worst class of tenement houses was those where a landlord had
accommodations for ten families, and these buildings comprise more than
half of the tenement houses of the city, and accommodate fully two-thirds
of the entire tenement-house population. When the number of families
living under one owner exceeded ten, it was found that such owner was
engaged in the keeping of a tenement-house as a business, and generally
as a speculator. It is among this class of owners that nearly all the
evils of the tenement-house system are found. The little colony exhibit
in their rooms, and in the little areas around their dwellings, extreme
want of care. The street in front of the place was reeking with slops
and garbage; the alleys and passage ways were foul with excrements; the
court was imperfectly paved, wet, and covered with domestic refuse; the
privies, located in a close court between the rear and front houses, were
dilapidated, and gave out volumes of noisome odors, which filled the
whole area, and were diffused through all the rooms opening upon it; and
the halls and apartments of the wretched o