raordinarily early, as I started out on a double search. The
first item on my list--"Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00"--took
me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning
traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds--factory-hands,
mill-girls, mechanics--the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted
for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention
to the formality of numbers. An interview with a milk-cart driver
brought the discouraging news that I might find it somewhere between
First and Second avenues, and I hurried on down the street, which
stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the
elevated railroad. The stoop-line on either side presented an
interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons.

Wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop I found Mrs.
McGinniss's number. It was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the
others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. A
soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the button informed possible
visitors that Mrs. McGinniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was
out of order, and that one should "Push Guggenheim's."

The Guggenheims responded with a click from above. I ascended a flight
of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of
numerous small Guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and
petticoats. Their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for
my guidance upward.

"Is this where Mrs. McGinniss lives?" I inquired of the dropsical
slattern who responded to my rap.

"I'm her."

Mrs. McGinniss's manner was aggressive. Conscious of her bare, sodden
arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed I had mistaken
her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed
her resentment by chilly reticence.

"I don't run no boarding-house, and I don't take just any trash that
come along, either."

I agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then,
somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a
stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled
with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. A
slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a
much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all
exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and so