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Out from the wide doorway of the long car labelled "32 hommes, 6 chevaux," was streaming an extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond, round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab, and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, yet with one likeness which bound them together like a convict's chain: weariness and stains of long, hard travelling, which thrust the few well-dressed men down to the level of the shabbiest.
On these excursions there was one little shop that was never neglected or overlooked; this was situated in a narrow slum, a long way from the great artery of traffic and fashion. After negotiating various tortuous windings and encountering horrible gusts of stale napie and the ever-odorous dorian, the car halted at a certain corner, and Mrs.
In the second place, we leave off the education of the children at too early an age. We hand over the children of the poorer classes during the most critical period of their lives to the influences of the streets and of the bad home, counteracted only by the efforts of the slum visitor or the missionary.
But the precincts are used as a graveyard, not only by the people of Ennis, but by the farmers and villagers for many miles around. Nothing can be imagined more painful than the appearance of these precincts. The graves are, for the most part, shallow, and closely huddled together. The cemetery, in truth, is a ghastly slum, a "tenement-house" of the dead.
We all know the process. The immigrant has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog Hollow.
"Witch soap or detergent, Witch cleanser upsurgent, which Witch do you need? You should have them all...." Then riding over the muted jingle the deep voice of the announcer saying "Tonight the Witches of the world clean a slum of the world ... a particular slum, this slum. "Witches, unite! And clean, clean, clean, Witch clean...."
I understood; and in the strength of domestic affection that burned with unquenched faith in the dark tenement after the many months of weary failure I read the history of this strange people that in every land and in every day has conquered even the slum with the hope of home. It was not to be put to shame here, either.
She had played her part with consummate cleverness; but there were two women who knew the true story of the birth of the child, which had been smuggled into the palace from a Florence slum. One was the changeling's mother, a woman of the people, whom a substantial bribe had induced to part with her new-born infant; the other was Bianca's waiting woman.
I accepted his rolls as instalments of the debt his country owed me, or ought to owe me, for my unavailing efforts in its behalf. It was under such auspices that I made the acquaintance of Mulberry Bend, the Five Points, and the rest of the slum, with which there was in the years to come to be a reckoning.
Nicholas Schliemann was a Swede, a tall, gaunt person, with hairy hands and bristling yellow beard; he was a university man, and had been a professor of philosophy until, as he said, he had found that he was selling his character as well as his time. Instead he had come to America, where he lived in a garret room in this slum district, and made volcanic energy take the place of fire.
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