“Say,” I said, “do you know where Mrs. Hicks lives to?”

They crowded around, eager.  The tallest boy, with curly red hair and freckles, pointed out Mrs. Hicks’ residence, the upper windows of a brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall.  After I had rung and waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed Italian woman with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was sitting that I must go down a side alley to find Mrs. Hicks.  Out of a promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row of green blinds and a screen door.  Somebody’s housekeeping was scattered around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans.

The screen door opened to my knock and the Hicks family gushed at me—­ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an under-waist and petticoat.  The interior was neat; the wooden floors were scrubbed spotless.  I congratulated myself.  Mrs. Hicks clucked to the family group, smiled at me, and said: 

“I never took a boarder in my life.  I ain’t got room enough for my own young ones, let alone strangers.”

[Illustration:  “THE BREATH OF THE BLACK, SWEET NIGHT REACHED THEM, FETID, HEAVY WITH THE ODOUR OF DEATH AS IT BLEW ACROSS THE STOCKYARDS”]

There were two more names on my list.  I proceded to the nearest and found an Irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo picture cards.

She had rheumatism in her “limbs” and moved with difficulty.  She was glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention of taking me.  From my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as a cot in Mrs. Flannagan’s front parlour.  I even offered in my eagerness to sleep on the horsehair sofa.  Womanlike, she gave twenty little reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was this: 

“Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind having you myself, but I’ve got three sons, and you know boys is queer.”

It was late, the sun had set and only the twilight remained for my search before night would be upon me and I would be driven to some charity refuge.

I had one more name, and climbed to find its owner in a tenement flat.  She was a German woman with a clubfoot.  Two half-naked children incrusted with dirt were playing on the floor.  They waddled toward me as I asked what my chances were for finding a room and board.  The mother struck first one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell into two little heaps, both wailing.  From a hole back of the kitchen came the sympathetic response of a half-starved shaggy dog.  He howled and the babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment.  There was one room rented to a day lodger who worked nights, and one room without a window where the German family slept.  She proposed that I share the bed with her that night until she could get an extra cot.  Her husband and the children could sleep on the parlour lounge.  She was hideous and dirty.  Her loose lips and half-toothless mouth were the slipshod note of an entire existence.  There was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging on a peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging to the tearful twins.