If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers held that if the owner did not care for anything but rents, the housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East River--old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York, or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street. These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their own. They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews, while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them. These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand, and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he declared.