utty showing through, just
where every nail had been driven.

Only the very poorest or the most shiftless of Mount Hope's population
found a refuge in this quarter. The Montgomerys being strictly eligible,
it was but natural that Joe should have taken up his abode here on the
day the first of the eight houses had been finished. Joe was burdened by
no troublesome convictions touching the advantages of a gravelly soil
or a southern exposure, and the word sanitation had it been spoken in
his presence would have conveyed no meaning to his mind. He had never
heard of germs, and he had as little prejudice concerning stagnant water
as he had predilection for clear water. He knew in a general way that
all water was wet, but further than this he gave the element no thought.

Thus it came about that his was the very oldest family seated in this
delectable spot. The young Montgomerys could with perfect propriety
claim precedence at all the stagnant pools that offered superior
advantages as yielding a rich harvest of tadpoles. While the mature
intelligence might have considered these miniature lakes as highly
undesirable, the young Montgomerys were not unmindful of their
blessings. As babies, clothed in shapeless garments, they launched upon
the green slime their tiny fleet of chips, and, grown a little older, it
was here they waded in the happy summer days. The very dump-carts came
and went like perpetual argosies, bringing riches--discarded furniture
and cast-off clothing--to their very door.

In merciful defiance of those hidden perils that lurk where sanitation
and hygiene are unpractised sciences, Joe's numerous family throve and
multiplied. The baby carriage which had held his firstborn,--Arthur, now
aged fourteen,--was still in use, the luster of its paint much dimmed
and its upholstery but a memory. It had trundled a succession of little
Montgomerys among the cinder piles; indeed, it was almost a feature of
the landscape, for Joe's family was his chiefest contribution to the
wealth of his country.

There had been periods varying from a few days to a few weeks when the
Montgomerys were sole tenants of that row of slab-sided houses; their
poverty being a fixed condition, they were merely sometimes poorer. No
transient gleam of a larger prosperity had ever illuminated the horizon
of their lives, and they had never been tempted to move to other parts
of the town where the ground and the rents were higher.

Residents of thi