The inside tenement, facing on the court, through most of the year is densely packed with people. For a large part of the length of the court it is only four feet wide, and the front windows of the house, which is three stories in height, look out on the dark wall which is only four feet away. On a dark day there is scarcely any light at all in these rooms; and on the brightest sunshiny day there is only a little light during the middle of the day, and never any direct rays of the sun. I found, up in one of these rooms, a young woman with her first-born in her arms,--a pale, sickly little child, not yet a year old, that will certainly die before the summer is out, if it stays there. This poor young mother was born in Maine, and followed her husband down here from the green fields and the breath of the pines. The husband works out of the city during the day, coming home late in the evening and going out in the morning; but all day long the mother and wife is kept here with her invalid child. Their faces look like potato-vines that have sprouted and grown in the cellar. They are dying for the lack of sunshine and pure air. [Illustration: CELLARWAY LEADING TO UNDERGROUND APARTMENTS.] Modern science is imperative in its urgent emphasis on the influence of light and sunshine on health; and we are told that children brought up even in close valleys do not thrive so well as those raised on the hillsides or the tablelands, and that families through the generations grow smaller in stature, and less vigorous in physical and mental force, if much excluded from light and sunshine. He was a wise old father who lived out on the plains, and came to visit his son, who had moved into a deep mountain gorge. At family prayers he thanked the Lord that his son was still well, although he lived where the sun rose at nine o'clock in the morning and set at four in the afternoon. But there are scores of Boston tenement houses where the sun never rises at all, except on the roof-tops, or now and then sends a slant ray, thrown down into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, to take you the second time into such a place. Go with me into one that is not ten minutes' walk from the mansions of wealth and luxury on Beacon Hill. We go back through a narrow passage, where you can touch the walls on either side of you, and then down some steps into a dark underground court. Now you have to bend over almost double till you feel your way to a door on your left, and knock. In answer to the "Come," you open the door and go in, and are barely able to stand upright inside the room.