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Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, "to keep a date" with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch Johnny's signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the street doorway.
These conditions rendered it impossible for the families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship. I visited the tenement-houses once with my colleagues of the committee, once with some of the labor union representatives, and once or twice by myself.
We are very much interested in the cleaning of city streets, and well we may be; but up to this day a larger number of men and women have concerned themselves actively about sweeping them of dust and dirt than of sweeping them free of these children. If dirt is misplaced matter, then what do you call a child who sits eternally on the curbstones and in the gutters of our tenement-house districts?
Some one had mentioned the great tenement-house fire in Jay Gardiner's presence, and the fact that quite a quaint character, a tipsy basket-maker, had lost his life therein, but the young doctor looked up without the slightest gleam of memory drifting through his brain.
He had climbed five flights of tenement-house stairs, equal to about thirty flights of civilized stairs, and procuring the key of his mother's room from Mrs. Maguinness, who lived in the third room beyond, where it was always left when Mrs. Biggs went out to get her papers, he had entered within the four walls that he called his home.
Maginnis was in despondency and her usual indecision, that she heard Mrs. Frankland's address in which the cure of the poor girl in the tenement-house was told as an illustration of the power of prayer." "Mrs. Frankland worked up all the details with striking effect, no doubt," said Millard, with an expression of disgust. "Well, you know Mrs. Frankland can't help being eloquent.
Millard wondered at the display of trinkets and confectionery in the shop-windows, not knowing that those whose backs are cheaply clad crave ornaments, and those whose bellies lack bread are ravenous for luxuries. Being a fastidious man and for years accustomed to the refinements of life, he exaggerated the discomforts of tenement-house living.
I went to other rooms of the same tenement-house on previous occasions. Q. Have you reason to believe M. Latour ever saw you prior to the day of his arrest? A. No. I am sure he did not. I was especially careful to keep out of his way. Q. You are certain that on the several occasions when you say you entered his rooms you were not observed by him while there?
She felt faint before she reached the tenement-house, and only the consciousness that she must not give way to illness in this neighborhood gave her strength to proceed. Once inside, she dropped down on the lowest step of the stairway, regardless of dust, until she had recovered somewhat, then wearily climbed the steps.
It proved that she had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came to nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all patience with them.
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