e, some were vagrants, and others were criminals.

I do not believe that all the sanitary measures in the world could ever
make these places clean or healthy. The atmosphere is always too foul
and dense to be breathed by any but lungs accustomed to it. When the
cellars are crowded with lodgers, and the heat of the stove adds to the
poison, it must be appalling. The poor wretches who seek shelter here
are more than half stupefied by it, and pass the night in this condition
instead of in a healthful sleep. They pay from ten to twenty-five cents
for their lodgings, and if they desire a supper or breakfast, are given a
cup of coffee and a piece of bread, or a bowl of soup for a similar sum.

As a matter of course only vagrants and those who have gone down into the
depths of poverty come here. They must choose between the cellars and
the streets, and the beds offered them here are warmer and softer than
the stones of the street.

"Have we seen the worst?" I asked Mr. Finn, as we came out of the last
place.

"No," he replied, "there are worse places yet. But I'll not take you
there."

The reader will readily credit this assertion, after reading the
following account of a visit of the Health Officers to one of a number of
similar cellars in Washington Street, on the west side of the city:

"The place next visited was No. 27 Washington street. This building is
also owned by 'Butcher Burke,' and is one of the most filthy and horrible
places in the city. We passed under an old tumble-down doorway that
seemed to have no earthly excuse for standing there, and into a dismal,
dark entry, with a zig-zag wall covered with a leprous slime, our
conductor crying out all the time: 'Steady, gentlemen, steady, keep to
your left; place is full of holes.'

"Presently we emerged into a yard with a detestable pavement of broken
bricks and mud, with high, towering houses surmounting it all around, and
a number of broken outhouses and privies covering a large portion of the
ground surface of the yard. Turning around, we could see the back of the
tenement house from whose entry we had just emerged, with its numberless
and wretched windows, shutting out the sky, or the fog, which was the
only thing visible above us, and a cloud of clothes-lines stretched
hither and thither, like a spider's web.

"There were eight privies in the yard, and we entered them. The night
soil was within a _foot and a half_ of the seats, and the odor was