It is hot and dirty here everywhere. How could it be otherwise? Every one of these housekeepers must have a fire in her room every time she wants hot water for washing or any other purpose. Take the day of my visit,--one of the hottest in June; it is ninety degrees in the shade, but with the fire in the rickety stove in the room in which this mother and her little girl are working, it cannot be less than a hundred and thirty. But the fire cannot go out, or the washing will stop, and there will be no food to-morrow. For these two miserable sweat-boxes--the paper half torn off, bed-bug dens that nothing could thoroughly cleanse except a fire that would exterminate the very walls--she pays two dollars and a half per week. As a striking illustration of the good results of agitation on these subjects, I called at this house during the past week, when one of the tenants told me that my repeated visits to the place, and the fact that I had had a photographer there making views of it, had awakened so much comment in the section that the landlord had got frightened and had had the corridors washed, and had put new paper on some of the rooms. Off Norman Street in the West End is a court which I have visited during the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses on this court are occupied by Italian fruit-venders for the most part. The court itself is littered up with refuse and decayed fruit in a most filthy and unhealthy manner. In one of these large tenement houses there is no family which occupies more than one room. Let us investigate a few of them. Here is a room fifteen feet long. At its narrow end it is only five feet six inches wide, and at the other end not quite seven feet wide. In this narrow lane five people live. Huge strings of bananas in every stage of ripening hang over the piles of filthy bedding. It is in the second story, and the corridor in front, which is forty-three inches wide--unusually spacious, as you will see later--is half taken up with boxes of decaying fruit, buckets of slops, and piles of refuse. The walls are as black and rusty as the stove. Here is another family residence in this building. The size is ten and one-half by ten and one-fourth feet. Four people live here. The entire furnishings are not worth five dollars. The cupboard is a lemon-box with a partition in it, set on the floor. The bread, kneaded and ready to bake, is laid out on an old, dirty, colored handkerchief on the pile of bedding; there are no chairs, table, or other furniture of any kind. Another room which also answers for home for four people, is sixteen feet long and six feet five inches wide. The walls here, as in many other rooms, have large sections of the plastering torn off, and are blackened with many years of smoke and dirt. [Illustration: ITALIAN FRUIT-VENDERS AT HOME.]