It was the first day of May. A hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house behind it. Down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the neighbourhood. The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy. There were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and needed repainting. It was already late in the afternoon: I had but an hour or two before dark to find a lodging. The miserable, overcrowded tenement houses repelled me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. I hailed a cluster of children in the gutter: "Say," I said, "do you know where Mrs. Hicks lives to?" They crowded around, eager. The tallest boy, with curly red hair and freckles, pointed out Mrs. Hicks' residence, the upper windows of a brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall. After I had rung and waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed Italian woman with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was sitting that I must go down a side alley to find Mrs. Hicks. Out of a promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row of green blinds and a screen door. Somebody's housekeeping was scattered around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans. The screen door opened to my knock and the Hicks family gushed at me--ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an under-waist and petticoat. The interior was neat; the wooden floors were scrubbed spotless. I congratulated myself. Mrs. Hicks clucked to the family group, smiled at me, and said: "I never took a boarder in my life. I ain't got room enough for my own young ones, let alone strangers." [Illustration: "THE BREATH OF THE BLACK, SWEET NIGHT REACHED THEM, FETID, HEAVY WITH THE ODOUR OF DEATH AS IT BLEW ACROSS THE STOCKYARDS"] There were two more names on my list. I proceded to the nearest and found an Irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo picture cards. She had rheumatism in her "limbs" and moved with difficulty. She was glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention of taking me. From my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as a cot in Mrs. Flannagan's front parlour. I even offered in my eagerness to sleep on the horsehair sofa. Womanlike, she gave twenty little reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was this: "Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind having you myself, but I've got three sons, and you know _boys is queer_."