smoke," said Mr. Siddons.

Ditmar lit one for himself.

"Now, what can I do for you?" he asked.

"Well, as I wrote you in my letter, I was engaged to make as thorough an
examination as possible of the living conditions and housing of the
operatives in the city of Hampton. I'm sure you'd be interested in
hearing something of the situation we found."

"I suppose you've been through our mills," said Ditmar.

"No, the fact is--"

"You ought to go through. I think it might interest you," Ditmar put a
slight emphasis on the pronoun. "We rather pride ourselves on making
things comfortable and healthy for our people."

"I've no doubt of it--in fact, I've been so informed. It's because of
your concern for the welfare of your workers in the mills that I ventured
to come and talk to you of how most of them live when they're at home,"
replied Siddons, as Janet thought, rather neatly. "Perhaps, though living
in Hampton, you don't quite realize what the conditions are. I know a man
who has lived in Boston ten years and who hasn't ever seen the Bunker
Hill monument."

"The Bunker Hill monument's a public affair," retorted Ditmar, "anybody
can go there who has enough curiosity and interest. But I don't see how
you can expect me to follow these people home and make them clean up
their garbage and wash their babies. I shouldn't want anybody to
interfere with my private affairs."

"But when you get to a point where private affairs become a public
menace?" Siddons objected. "Mr. Ditmar, I've seen block after block of
tenements ready to crumble. There are no provisions for foundations,
thickness of walls, size of timbers and columns, and if these houses had
been deliberately erected to make a bonfire they couldn't have answered
the purpose better. If it were not for the danger to life and the pity of
making thousands of families homeless, a conflagration would be a
blessing, although I believe the entire north or south side of the city
would go under certain conditions. The best thing you could do would be
to burn whole rows of these tenements, they are ideal breeding grounds
for disease. In the older sections of the city you've got hundreds of
rear houses here, houses moved back on the lots, in some extreme cases
with only four-foot courts littered with refuse,--houses without light,
without ventilation, and many of the rooms where these people are cooking
and eating and sleeping are so damp and foul they're not fit to put dogs