But there was little enough to laugh at; less still, when the big buildings sprang up that you see behind the shanties. They are the double-deckers of to-day. They were supposed to be a “way out,” for at least they had room for the teeming populations; but it turned out the other way. They gave the home the hardest blow of all, and to-day they are the curse that cleaves to us for our sins of the past, and with which we will have to struggle while we live. I have said a good deal so far, and shall have more to say before I am done, about murder. It is not a nice word, but right here is an instance of what I mean. The particular houses that show in the picture were built by one Buddensiek, whose name we all came to know in the after years. I heard of it first when I went with the health inspector to investigate a complaint of foul stenches that was made by the tenants in those houses. The explanation proved simple. The builder had merely run the soil-pipe three feet or so into the ground without connecting it with the sewer. That time he escaped indictment. It is somehow not so easy to bring a man to book who poisons his tenants with bad plumbing as the one who sticks a knife into his neighbor. Some years after when, grown bold, he neglected to put lime in his mortar and his tenements fell down and killed his workmen before the tenants got into them, the jail claimed him at last on a charge of manslaughter. [Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE From “The Children of the Poor.” Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.] And now here are the “old church tenements” I spoke of (see illustration facing page 92); upon the records of the Health Department “among the largest contributors to the hospitals” in the city. The cellar, where the tenants paid two and three dollars a month,—that was before the day when the whole population of “cave-dwellers,” more than five thousand in number, was dragged out upon the street by the police and not allowed to go back—was the old vault in which the sexton stored corpses in the days when the building was a church. Do you wonder, when you come to think of it, that the church lost its grip upon the people of that day, and that some of the feeling of that still survives? Do you wonder that these people were not attracted by a scheme of salvation that meant damnation in this life, so far as they could see? I do not. Bear in mind the old church for a little while; I shall have more to tell you of that. That, too, was atoned for, thank God! [Illustration: TENEMENT WHERE A HOME WAS MURDERED]