re crowding back into the little black
shacks in the foreign quarter of the city, drawn thither by their
traditionary social instincts, or driven by economic necessities.
All they ask is bed space on the floor or, for a higher price, on
the home-made bunks that line the walls, and a woman to cook the
food they bring to her; or, failing such a happy arrangement, a
stove on which they may boil their varied stews of beans or barley,
beets or rice or cabbage, with such scraps of pork or beef from the
neck or flank as they can beg or buy at low price from the slaughter
houses, but ever with the inevitable seasoning of garlic, lacking
which no Galician dish is palatable. Fortunate indeed is the owner
of a shack, who, devoid of hygienic scruples and disdainful of city
sanitary laws, reaps a rich harvest from his fellow-countrymen,
who herd together under his pent roof. Here and there a house
surrendered by its former Anglo-Saxon owner to the "Polak" invasion,
falls into the hands of an enterprising foreigner, and becomes to
the happy possessor a veritable gold mine.

Such a house had come into the possession of Paulina Koval. Three
years ago, with two children she had come to the city, and to the
surprise of her neighbours who had travelled with her from Hungary,
had purchased this house, which the owner was only too glad to sell.
How the slow-witted Paulina had managed so clever a transaction no
one quite understood, but every one knew that in the deal Rosenblatt,
financial agent to the foreign colony, had lent his shrewd assistance.
Rosenblatt had known Paulina in the home land, and on her arrival in
the new country had hastened to proffer his good offices, arranging the
purchase of her house and guiding her, not only in financial matters,
but in things domestic as well. It was due to Rosenblatt that the
little cottage became the most populous dwelling in the colony.
It was his genius that had turned the cellar, with its mud floor,
into a dormitory capable of giving bed space to twenty or twenty-five
Galicians, and still left room for the tin stove on which to cook
their stews. Upon his advice, too, the partitions by which the cottage
had been divided into kitchen, parlour, and bed rooms, were with one
exception removed as unnecessary and interfering unduly with the most
economic use of valuable floor space. Upon the floor of the main room,
some sixteen feet by twelve, under Rosenblatt's manipulation,
twenty boarders regula