All the tenements here were of this size and shape--a room with windows opening upon the court and at the rear the small black bin or pen for the bed. The room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars a month. If he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some thirty thousand evictions have taken place in the past year. But an eviction is by no means the dreadful hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be sure, it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with his poor household gear in any weather and at any hour; but if it is very cold or very wet weather, the evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take them in, and their life begins again on the old terms; or the charities come to their aid, and they are dispersed into the different refuges until the father or mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. Still, natural as it all is, I should think it must surprise an Irishman, who supposed he had left eviction behind him in his native land, to find it so rife in the country of his adoption. II. My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but I thought that if what I had seen was typical, I had seen enough in that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in upon without any ceremony but the robust “Good-morning!” my companion gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and made us as much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.