trated by necessity or accident similar
industrial neighborhoods, where human beings swarmed and life was ugly,
only to escape as soon as possible. But this time she did not wish to
hurry. Clark's Field seemed different to her from anything else she had
ever seen.

It was all new, and yet in the way of slums it was immemorially ancient
at the same time, as if the members of old races that had come to fill
it had brought with them all the grime, all the dreariness of
generations of bitter living. And it was this, rather than the marvelous
transformation of the sandy field which Adelle dimly remembered, that
seized hold of her. How could people live so thickly together, swarm
like flies in so many identical doorways, get along with so little air
or sunshine or freedom of movement!

"Packed like rotting sardines," was Archie's sneering comment.

Artificially packed, too, scientifically packed in an up-to-date manner,
and all in the space of a few years! Modern magic they said of things
like this, and took a strange blind pride in it. Even Archie observed
with curiosity,--"They must have been a busy little bunch that got this
up so quickly!"

Indeed, the Washington Trust Company, under the thin disguise of the
Clark's Field Associates, had shown great shrewdness and ingenuity in
"developing" the fifty-acre tract so that the greatest possible sum
could be extracted from its lean soil. They had resisted all temptations
to open it as "a residential section" of the growing city. They knew
that Alton was condemned to the coarser uses of society and must be an
industrial slum. So they had sold a small portion in one corner to a
steel foundry--one of the subsidiaries of a great corporation. And then
they developed the remainder for the use of the operatives gathered
together from all parts of the earth. The choicest lots they reserved
for "future growth." Along the broad South Road they built substantial
brick buildings for stores and offices. In the nest of by-streets that
ribbed the tract they erected lofty tenement warrens, as closely packed
as the law allows,--not the lowest order of tenement, to be sure,
because in the long run such buildings do not make a good investment;
but a slightly higher class of brick, bathroomed, three-and four-room
tenements, from the rear of which flowed out long streamers of clothes
drying in the wind. For the most part Clark's Field had thus received
its "development." That which had agitated