blem of heredity,--the kittens took it from
the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,--there was
nothing specially remarkable about them. It was not an alley, either,
when it comes to that, but rather a row of four on five old tenements in
a back yard that was reached by a passageway somewhat less than three
feet wide between the sheer walls of the front houses. These had once
had pretensions to some style. One of them had been the parsonage of the
church next door that had by turns been an old-style Methodist
tabernacle, a fashionable negroes' temple, and an Italian mission
church, thus marking time, as it were, to the upward movement of the
immigration that came in at the bottom, down in the Fourth Ward, fought
its way through the Bloody Sixth, and by the time it had travelled the
length of Mulberry Street had acquired a local standing and the right to
be counted and rounded up by the political bosses. Now the old houses
were filled with newspaper offices and given over to perpetual insomnia.
Week-days and Sundays, night or day, they never slept. Police
headquarters was right across the way, and kept the reporters awake.
From his window the chief looked down the narrow passageway to the
bottom of the alley, and the alley looked back at him, nothing daunted.
No man is a hero to his valet, and the chief was not an autocrat to Cat
Alley. It knew all his human weaknesses, could tell when his time was up
generally before he could, and winked the other eye with the captains
when the newspapers spoke of his having read them a severe lecture on
gambling or Sunday beer-selling. Byrnes it worshipped, but for the
others who were before him and followed after, it cherished a
neighborly sort of contempt.

In the character of its population Cat Alley was properly cosmopolitan.
The only element that was missing was the native American, and in this
it was representative of the tenement districts in America's chief city.
The substratum was Irish, of volcanic properties. Upon this were imposed
layers of German, French, Jewish, and Italian, or, as the alley would
have put it, Dutch, Sabe, Sheeny, and Dago; but to this last it did not
take kindly. With the experience of the rest of Mulberry Street before
it, it foresaw its doom if the Dago got a footing there, and within a
month of the moving in of the Gio family there was an eruption of the
basement volcano, reenforced by the sanitary policeman, to whom
complaint had