Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 November 1868 — The Hidden Sights of New York. [ARTICLE]

The Hidden Sights of New York.

(N. X Correspondence of Providence Free*. ] We turned into Five Points, and went into some of the lodging houses. Think of thirteen persons crouched in one sniall room, without a window, or any ; hole but the door! Male and female, black and white, little children—all bundled iu a heap together on the ilirty straw. The air was like a pest house. One glance was enongh—one taste of that air will last a life time. Jt was a clean lodging place. Cheap indeed it was—and nasty! Pounding at one door for admission brought out B comely-looking black woman. “Rouse up your husband, I. must see him,” said the delective. The husband came; he was a white man! “They have lived together as man and wife over two years.” Sharpen! said to me afterward, “and they get along first-rate." Here was a place where children lived. Two or three rooms, in a battered old that shook with every step over its floors? The children were homeless ones, fatherless and motherless. turned out_tQ live or die, as might be, in the streets of careless, heedless New York. Here they come to sleep, paying the old hag who kept the room nix eente a night. By day they tramp the city, getting a living in any way they could best. They were cuddled around the rooms under scanty, dirty blankets, and kept warm by a wretched stove glowing feebly in one corner. Moat of them were bovs, ppp? over twelve years: wedged in with them, though, were some hungry-looking girls, in whose faces the hard lines of want, and sickness, and privation were growing already. It made me heartsick to look at them —lonely strays ! Poor, motherless things! May He in infinite love and mercy forget thee not ! Down in the cellar was a gang of ragpickers. They were getting ready for work, and with hook and basket would soon be out over the city, working their business. Piles of rags, bones, offal, broken iron filled the place, save where a few articles of furniture stood. They were Italians, and not disposed to be sociable. One had his bed luxuriously arranged on a pile of old carpet rags, which were damp and noisome with the mud of the streets. These rag-pickers manage to make money in their dirty way; they save it, too, and some of these years they will gh home to their country and cnjby it. The women work as hard as the men, live as roughly, have no shame or decency about sexual matters, are as strong limbed. I asked the age of one of the Women who seemed rather more disposed to talk than the others. She was thirty-one. ‘ tshould have said fifty. She had not one trace of youth left—a hard, weatherbeaten face, a body bent and unhinged, a slow, plodding step and wrinkles coming. ’She had beehln New Yorkreeven yents—all the time a rag-picker. Had she got rich enough to go back ? Rich enough! and she smiled—-“I have two children in Italy that my money is educating. They don't know their poor mother, poor dears, but I shall work hard for them, and sometime I will go back and see them I” This woman carried a bag and fished in gutters and refuse barrels, from four iu the morning till past sunrise, came home and sorted rags and offal all day in a close, damp cellar; and yet there was a tender, romantic sentiment in her life which made her look not to herself but to her'little ones. May she have her wish and go back to them.