The Grenada gazette. (Grenada, Miss.) 1885-18??, 1885-12-19
"And does the Health Board permit

men and women to live in such places?"
''In such places!' the clerk repeated,
in unfeigned surprise. "Why, many a
family in Fifth avenue might well envy
those people. They have no sewer
gas, no unwholesome tainted air Of
crowded neighborhoods, no bad plumb
ing, no unhealthful surroundings Of
any sort. One side Of their home is
open to the pure air that blows over
the river and the running water is be-
meath them. Sickness may be said to
be unknown among those who do the
work around the Dumps 1t is to be
hoped that the Italians who can not
speak, in English, for themselves, are
as well pleased with their surroundings.
1t would naturally occur to any n
who had not Investigated the subject
that the waste of a great city like New
York must be enormous. Where Sc
many persons are gathered even the
extravagant and prodigal few, as they
must be in this working world when
compared with the whole population,
comprise a great many in q city of q
million and a half. But it is not the
folly of these few that one would
imagine to be the chief source Of the
great waste of the city so much as the
accumulated triles Of surplusage and
refuse that amount to little when the
contribution of a single person or even
of a household is concerned, but that
must form a little mint of value when
al. is put together. Think Of the veri-
est t%rifles, the pins or the nails, for in
stance, that are thrown away, dropped
by accident, swept out in house-clean-
ing, or that are in n way or other
lost by those who bought them and yet
that are either good for the uses for
which they were made, or because OF
the metal that they are made of and
that keeps its value when the nipple.
ment itself is useless!
But how different the fact is! Waste
there is, and great waste, despite the
philosophers assertion that nothing
is lost in the universe; but the waste
we speak of is rather in the villages
and smaller cities than in the great
n e such as New York. Take as many
towns of ten thousand inhabitants as are
necessary to form the number of pco-
pie that New York contains, and then
you will actually have something like
the wanton destruction of property
that one naturally credits to the En-
pire City, but in that city you find the
subject of waste interesting a class Of
citizens who devote themselves to
thriving upon and at the same time
preventing it. It would not pay a
store-keeper or Eighth avenue to sell
the bones that 60 as refuse from his
table at home, or to hoard the
fat his house-keeper discards from
Cle DuIcueF > ulcdI, VI W SdtHcl luC
waste pins, buttons, rags, bits OF pa
pers, or odds and ends of metal that
find their way into his ash barrel. At
the end of a year he would have a few
barrelfuls Of trash Of such a miscel-
laneous character that he would have
to find a dozen different sorts of deal
ers to rid him of it, and from each he
would obtain only a few cents at the
most. So it is with the cities of ten
thousand inhabitants; it does not pay
any one in them to ave the combined
refuse of all. The mountain of New
York's waste, on the other hand, is so
commanding that it attracts the atten-
ton of the economical. the ingenious,
the unfortunate, and those whom ma
ture seems to have designed as grovel-
ers. They swarm upon its top and
sides, and while they delve and pick
into and at it. they find it grows be-
meath them, and gives them constant
occupation and profit as well.-Har-
per's Weekly.