Few of the members of the Italian colony speak English, except here and there one has mastered a few common phrases; but there is one word that all of them understand, and that is “Beer.” Here, as in other quarters where the poor are found, sour beer is dealt out at a cent a glass. I once asked a police officer if there was much drunkenness there. “Oh, yes, sir,” he replied; “we can go in there any night and get a cart load of drunken men and women.” Passing through these quarters of abode of our foreign born brethren you will often find two or more families occupying a single room. Sometimes as many as a dozen people are to be found living in a small room. Often a family of five will take in lodgers at five cents a night. There are no beds. Chalk marks are made on the floor allotting a space 2x6 feet to each other. To add to their income they sell sour beer at 2 cents a quart. The place is filthy beyond belief. The upper floors are not quite so bad; but they contain sights that baffle description. The inmates are huddled together in disregard of cleanliness and decency. The rooms are dirty and the air is foul. The food is gathered principally from the garbage boxes of the streets or from the offal of the markets. The cooking is done from time to time and fills the room with horrible odors. There are no bedsteads. Filthy looking mattresses on the floor, or on boards placed upon supports. The inmates never undress, but go to bed with their clothes on, including their boots and shoes. The children are wan and pinched in appearance, and frightfully dirty. What wonder that sickness and disease hold high revel here! Bad as is the lot of these people, they at least exist upon the face of the earth. Those who dwell in the cellars of these wretched quarters are infinitely worse off. They have but one entrance, and a single window gives light and ventilation. There is no outlet in the rear and the filth of the street drains steadily into them. They are occupied by the poorest of the poor, and the amount, of misery and wretchedness, dirt and squalor to be witnessed in them passes description. In the winter a stove heats the place, and renders the air so foul that one unaccustomed to it cannot breath in the room. Many of these cellars are lodging houses into which the wretched outcasts who walk the streets during the day, crowd for shelter at night. They pay from two to five cents for a night’s lodging, and sometimes as many as from twenty-five to fifty are packed in these terrible holes. There are sections of many streets in the business part of the city that equal in wretchedness and misery those previously described. They are terrible streets, and even the police venture into them with caution. Drunken brawls, fights and stabbing affrays are of nightly occurrence.