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It was afternoon when she found herself out-of-doors. She walked with an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces. The day was radiant, metallic: one of those searching American days so calculated to reveal the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and the excesses of our architecture. The streets looked bare and hideous; everything stared and glittered.
"Ring the alarm and have the street-cleaning men dig us out," he said merrily. "Do you know, Nan, that I just love the snow. It makes me feel like singing and whistling." And he broke into a merry whistle. "I love it because it looks so white and pure, Bert." They were speedily joined by a number of other boys and girls, all bound for school.
The problem is one of the many great ones of modern city life which our age of invention must bequeath unsolved to the dawning century. In the Street-Cleaning Department's service the snow-plough holds yet its ancient place of usefulness. Eleven of them are kept for use in Manhattan and the Bronx alone.
It seems there is one mystery which appertains to these unpleasant birds; namely, as to their breeding places. No one knows where they go to build their nests and to raise their young. The imaginative stranger is perhaps inclined to regard them as tokens of danger to the newcomer. All things considered, many a northern city has a less efficient street-cleaning department.
That report says in part: "It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply, a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds.
The mere statement that the Street-Cleaning Department last winter carted away and dumped into the river 1,679,087 cubic yards of snow at thirty cents a yard, and was then hotly blamed for leaving us in the slush, fairly measures the one and is enough to set the taxpayer to thinking.
Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways are negligent in making repairs, or in replacing pavement that has been disturbed or destroyed. There is no escape.
There are some 40,000 men who join the army voluntarily for a term of two or three years, and who re-enlist and become non-commissioned officers, and if they remain twelve years they are entitled to $200 on leaving the service, and head the lists of candidates for the railway, postal, police, street-cleaning, and other civil services.
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