In the side streets, just off the main thoroughfare, conditions were even more congested and depressing. On either hand ricketty, grimy tenements were alive with bearded Russians, fierce-looking Italians, vociferating Irish, pot-bellied Germans. From broken windows hung clotheslines bending under the load of newly washed rags; on flimsy, rusty fire-escapes were jammed filthy mattresses on which slept the wretched occupants, glad to escape from the foul air and heat within; dark stairways and stoops were thronged with neglected, consumptive children. The evil smells were so numerous that it was impossible to determine which was the most objectionable. The air was full of discordant, nerve-racking sounds. On one side of the street an Italian was grinding a wheezy organ, while little girls, some with bare feet, danced to the music. A few yards farther on, boys with white faces drawn by hunger, were rummaging eagerly in ash barrels, hunting for scraps of refuse. Two women were pulling each other's hair in the centre of a circle of encouraging neighbors, neglected babes were screaming, dogs were barking, a vendor was shrieking his wares. It was Hell, yet nothing unusual--only everyday life in the slums. "Isn't it dreadful?" murmured Paula, as she and Tod hurried along Rivington Street. "Gee!" replied her escort. "Look at some of those faces! They seem hardly human. Animals are better looking." "They are not to blame," answered Paula sadly. "These poor people are the victims of circumstances. They have been brutalized--the Jews by centuries of race persecution, the others by merciless economic conditions. The black poverty in which they live is well nigh inconceivable. Their desperate struggle for mere existence is unbelievable." "Phew!" exclaimed Tod, as he peeped through the window of a gloomy, broken-down rookery. "How can any one live in such a place? The Black Hole of Calcutta couldn't have been much worse!" "That's just it," answered Paula, with some warmth. "You self-satisfied, well-fed people uptown don't take the trouble to come down here to find out how the poor live. We Settlement workers know, for we are right in the heart of it all. What you see from the street is nothing. You must enter some of these tenements if you wish to become really acquainted with the shocking conditions in which they live--the crushing poverty, the physical and moral suffering, the gross immorality. In some places as many as twelve persons, full-grown men and women, half-grown boys and girls, all eat and sleep in one dark, ill-ventilated room. Can you wonder that such a life brutalizes them and that they die like flies?" Tod shrugged his shoulders.