Many took advantage of either of these two offers, but many more held back. There was one slight difficulty. Mr. Barnum’s contracts of sale included a temperance pledge and a clause promising the renunciation of the use of tobacco. It puzzled Barnum and worried him that many men really preferred to pay rent month after month in dirty tenements, where they could drink, smoke, and beat their wives in freedom, to the opportunity which he offered them of living under his management in “nice dwellings, painted and furnished with green blinds.” Moralizing on the subject in his autobiography, he wrote in his bewilderment: “The money they have since expended for whisky and tobacco would have given them a house of their own, if the money had been devoted to that object, and their positions, socially and morally, would have been better than they are to-day. How many infatuated men there are in all parts of the country who could now be independent and even owners of their own carriages but for their slavery to these miserable habits!” There was even a clause in the contracts of sale providing that if the door yards of the model cottages were not kept clean P. T. Barnum had the right to arrange for their cleaning at the expense of the owners of the houses. If these conditions were accepted, Barnum sometimes advanced as much as seven-eighths of the purchase money, and accepted in payment instalments as low as ten dollars. But the nice dwellings were the pride of his heart, and it concerned him even more than the profits of his enterprise that no tobacco juice should stain those pretty green blinds, and that the happy, smiling New England mechanics should not give off fumes of whisky as they came to pay him their rents. There were enough sober, thoughtful, economical laborers to take advantage of Barnum’s offers, and the new suburb prospered rapidly. A horse car line, in which Barnum owned ten per cent. of the stock, was soon in operation. The toll bridges operated by Barnum and Noble were bought by the City of Bridgeport and opened to the public free of charge. East Bridgeport became a recognized part of the City of Bridgeport, and streets were named for Barnum and his daughters, Caroline, Helen, and Pauline; but none was called Charity, in the proper fear, no doubt, that no one would live in it. IV