In a back tenement, after passing through a narrow alley, the home of this woman was found. It was about ten o’clock in the morning. After climbing a dark and narrow stairway, one came to a landing from which a view could be had of the interior of the apartment. In one room was a frowsled young woman in tawdry rags, her hair unkempt, her face streaked with black, while on the floor two dirty, half-naked children were rolling. At the sight of a stranger, they all came forward. The field worker made her way as best she could, across heaps of junk that cluttered the room, to a chair by an open window through which a breath of outside air could be obtained. On the bureau by the window a hideous diseased cat was curled in the sunshine. The mother, Jemima’s daughter, was not at home, but the woman who had presented herself was her daughter, and these were the grandchildren. The woman’s feeble-mindedness made it possible to ask her question after question, such as could not have been put to a normal person. Her answers threw a flood of light upon the general depravity of life under such conditions. When the mother at last arrived, she proved to be of a type somewhat different from anything before encountered in this family. She appeared to be criminalistic, or at least capable of developing along that line. Unfortunately, the visit could not either be prolonged or repeated, so that no satisfactory study was made. In the city, the individual is lost in the very immensity of the crowd that surrounds him, so that his individual actions, except such as he himself chooses to reveal or can be made to reveal, are lost to the people about him; therefore there was little hope of obtaining much side light on the problem here presented. During the short interview the older woman showed unmistakable signs of wanting to appear respectable in the midst of her depravity, something quite characteristic of the high-grade moron type in the family. She was friendly and distinctly more intelligent than her daughter, but there was little more will power or ability to cope with the problems of life. One of her daughters had disappeared off the face of the earth a few years before--there had been a baby--that was all they knew. She was working at Coney Island. One day she came home and, when she left the next morning, it was the last they ever saw of her. A brother of the girl had also disappeared in much the same way. The field worker left the tenement with the positive assurance that environment without strict personal supervision made little difference when it was a question of the feeble-minded. [Illustration: GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN OF “OLD SAL.”] [Illustration: CHILDREN OF GUSS SAUNDERS, WITH THEIR GRANDMOTHER.]