He saw much that was heartbreaking, much that was stomach-turning. He ventured to drift at last even to the infamous Five Points. It was foolhardy of him to wander alone in that region where human maggots festered among rotten timbers. Mr. Charles Dickens, the popular English novelist, had recently gone there with two policemen, and found material for a hideous chapter in his insulting volume _American Notes_. But RoBards felt that he owed Mrs. Lasher a little of his courage, and he gripped his walking stick firmly. The policemen with their stars glinting in the dark gave him some courage, but even the policemen’s lives were not safe here, where murder was the cleanest thing that happened. The thronged hovels were foul enough, but their very cellars were a-squirm with men and women and children. In some of these rat holes there were filthy soup houses, bars, dance dives where blacks, whites and mulattoes mixed. Such odious folk the whites were that RoBards wondered how the negroes could mix with them. And children danced here, too, with the slime from the wharves and the foreign ships. The poverty was grisly. In one sink, three men with three spoons drained one penny bowl of broth. A man shared a glass of turpentine gin with his five-year-old son. Another fought with his shrieking wife over a mug of bog-poteen. Men whiffed rank tobacco at a penny a load in rented clay pipes they could not even buy, but borrowed for the occasion. On the cellar steps, in the gutters, on the door sills and hanging out of the windows were drunkards, whole families drunk from grandam to infant at a boozy breast. RoBards had trouble in dodging the wavering steps of a six-year-old girl who was already a confirmed sot. Children offered themselves with terrifying words. Only the other day six little girls of respectable family had been taken from one of these dives: their parents had supposed them to be at school. There were ten thousand vagrant children in New York. The little girls who swept crossings and sold matches or flowers or what-not sold themselves, too. And the homeless boys who blacked boots studied crime and learned drunkenness in their babyhood. Here was the theory of infant damnation demonstrated on earth, with gin-soaked girls of ten and twelve maudlin at the side of their spewing mothers. One smutty-faced chit of twelve sidled up to the shuddering RoBards with words that made him almost faint, and tried to pick his pocket as he fled in horror. Beggars for coin half besought, half threatened him. Thugs, male and female, glared at him and cursed him for a nob, or meditated attacks upon the “goldfinch,” but their brains were too drenched for action. The very offal of poverty and crime reeled about his path, yet there was laughter. In one rookery two hundred negroes sang and patted while a juba dancer “laid it down.” Everywhere there was the desperate effort to escape from the dung of existence by way of drug or sleep or song or combat.