nthropists,
to have the children tagged, as they do in Japan, I am told, so as to
save the policeman wear and tear in taking them back and forth between
the Eldridge Street police station and headquarters, when they got lost.
If tagged, they could be assorted at once and taken to their homes.
Incidentally, the city would save the expense of many meals. It was
shrewdly suspected that the little ones were lost on purpose in a good
many cases, as a way of getting them fed at the public expense.

[Illustration: One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said,
"Our Daughter does not care to come Home to Sleep."]

That the children preferred the excitement of the police station, and
the distinction of a trip in charge of a brass-buttoned guardian, to the
Ludlow Street flat is easy enough to understand. A more unlovely
existence than that in one of these tenements it would be hard to
imagine. Everywhere is the stench of the kerosene stove that is forever
burning, serving for cooking, heating, and ironing alike, until the last
atom of oxygen is burned out of the close air. Oil is cheaper than
coal. The air shaft is too busy carrying up smells from below to bring
any air down, even if it is not hung full of washing in every story, as
it ordinarily is. Enterprising tenants turn it to use as a refrigerator
as well. There is at least a draught of air, such as it is. When fire
breaks out, this draught makes of the air shaft a flue through which the
fire roars fiercely to the roof, so transforming what was meant for the
good of the tenants into their greatest peril. The stuffy rooms bring
to mind this denunciation of the tenement builder of fifty years ago by
an angry writer, "He measures the height of his ceilings by the shortest
of the people, and by thin partitions divides the interior into as
narrow spaces as the leanest carpenter can work in." Most decidedly,
there is not room to swing the proverbial cat in any one of them. In one
I helped the children, last holiday, to set up a Christmas tree, so that
a glimpse of something that was not utterly sordid and mean might for
once enter their lives. Three weeks after, I found the tree standing yet
in the corner. It was very cold, and there was no fire in the room. "We
were going to burn it," said the little woman, whose husband was then in
the insane asylum, "and then I couldn't. It looked so kind o'
cheery-like there in the corner." My tree had borne the fruit I wished.

It