On the verge of this waste, which civilization had builded and shaped with its discarded odds and ends, were the meager beginnings of a poor suburb.  Here an enterprising landlord had erected a solitary row of slab-sided dwellings of a uniform ugliness; and had given to each a single coat of yellow paint of such exceeding thinness, that it was possible to determine by the whiter daubs of putty showing through, just where every nail had been driven.

Only the very poorest or the most shiftless of Mount Hope’s population found a refuge in this quarter.  The Montgomerys being strictly eligible, it was but natural that Joe should have taken up his abode here on the day the first of the eight houses had been finished.  Joe was burdened by no troublesome convictions touching the advantages of a gravelly soil or a southern exposure, and the word sanitation had it been spoken in his presence would have conveyed no meaning to his mind.  He had never heard of germs, and he had as little prejudice concerning stagnant water as he had predilection for clear water.  He knew in a general way that all water was wet, but further than this he gave the element no thought.

Thus it came about that his was the very oldest family seated in this delectable spot.  The young Montgomerys could with perfect propriety claim precedence at all the stagnant pools that offered superior advantages as yielding a rich harvest of tadpoles.  While the mature intelligence might have considered these miniature lakes as highly undesirable, the young Montgomerys were not unmindful of their blessings.  As babies, clothed in shapeless garments, they launched upon the green slime their tiny fleet of chips, and, grown a little older, it was here they waded in the happy summer days.  The very dump-carts came and went like perpetual argosies, bringing riches—­discarded furniture and cast-off clothing—­to their very door.

In merciful defiance of those hidden perils that lurk where sanitation and hygiene are unpractised sciences, Joe’s numerous family throve and multiplied.  The baby carriage which had held his firstborn,—­Arthur, now aged fourteen,—­was still in use, the luster of its paint much dimmed and its upholstery but a memory.  It had trundled a succession of little Montgomerys among the cinder piles; indeed, it was almost a feature of the landscape, for Joe’s family was his chiefest contribution to the wealth of his country.

There had been periods varying from a few days to a few weeks when the Montgomerys were sole tenants of that row of slab-sided houses; their poverty being a fixed condition, they were merely sometimes poorer.  No transient gleam of a larger prosperity had ever illuminated the horizon of their lives, and they had never been tempted to move to other parts of the town where the ground and the rents were higher.

Residents of this locality, not being burdened with any means of locomotion beyond their own legs, usually came and went by way of the high iron bridge; their legal right of way however was by a neglected thoroughfare that had ambitiously set out to be a street, but having failed of its intention, presently dwindled to a pleasant country road which not far beyond crossed the river by the old wooden bridge below the depot.