On some of the walls of these living rooms the cockroaches and bed-bugs swarm in abundance, literally by hundreds, at ten o'clock in the morning. The walls and ceilings have not only _not_ been cleansed or whitened this year, but it must have been many years since there has been an attempt made to clean them. In one of these bedrooms I counted twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms. The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have kept the sign in the office for all the good it has done, for in nearly every room the inmates admitted to the Italian interpreter who accompanied me, that from two to three times as many persons occupied the room as the sign permits. One of these buildings, four stories high, is so old and rickety that it cannot stand alone, and has careened over against the building next to it. Everything is of wood, and if it was once on fire, with its narrow, obstructed halls and stairways, the swarm of tenants would burn like rats in a trap. This is by no means an isolated case. When Rev. Mr. Barnett, of Whitechapel, London, was here a few days ago, one of the inspectors of the Board of Health took him to visit some of the tenement houses of South Boston and the North End. A _Boston Herald_ reporter went with them, and I quote from his report of the trip: "The party first visited the tenement houses of South Boston, occupied for the most part by the fishermen and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with smoke. Hardly a house was seen, in the whole course of the journey, where this simple law in the interest of health and sanitary condition of living had been observed. In many cases, it appeared as though it had not only been neglected this spring, but for many springs in the past. In driving from this section of the city to the North End, Mr. Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so bad as this in Whitechapel.'" [Illustration: UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS.]