Jist dogs! Of all the positions held during my four years in the underbrush none appealed to me so much as that of license inspector for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was ideal for my purpose—learning conditions in the tenements as actually existing, meeting the tenement-dwellers in their homes and as fellow human beings. If the job were an easy one I would be more chary about making such a statement for fear all those persons living or being in Greenwich Village, who refer to themselves as “we villagers,” would descend on the manager of the A. S. P. C. A. as boll-weevils take possession of a field of young and luxuriant cotton. To prevent such a disaster I state definitely—a license inspector for the A. S. P. C. A. earns every penny of his or her salary. It is a house-to-house, rain-or-shine, freeze-or-sunstroke job. It means going up and down stairs from eight-thirty in the morning to five in the afternoon. Wherever a dog is kept there must the inspector go. My duties as a social service worker for Bellevue Hospital took me all over New York City—East Side and West Side, from the Bronx to the Battery. As inspector for the A. S. P. C. A. my district extended from the north side of East Fourteenth Street to the south side of East Seventy-ninth, from Madison Avenue to East River. It included some of the oldest, most dilapidated, and slimiest of filthy tenements to be found in the greater city, and some of the newest, best planned, and best kept of the model tenements. It also included many homes of well-to-do persons and many palaces of multimillionaires. It was a fair slice of the greatest jungle of civilization. If there is a nationality on the globe not represented in that district, I never heard of it. It is a district in which anybody from anywhere may be met any day. Reading my diary it would seem that I met somebody from everywhere almost every day. That is, with one exception—I never met a Protestant minister of the Gospel. Every profession, every trade in every walk of life, but never a Protestant minister of the Gospel. The work was quite simple. On entering a tenement I would hunt up the janitor. “How are you, janitor?” I would greet, and the rougher and more dishevelled the woman the more courteously sympathetic I would make my tone. “I’m your inspector and have come to go through your house.” Invariably on this announcement an expression of concern, sometimes amounting to consternation, would flash into her face. Then, always hastily, I would add: “I’m calling on all the dogs in your house. How many are there?” “Oh, dogs!” she would exclaim, and the troubled expression would be wiped off by a look of relief, sometimes by a smile.