"And this," Pittsey said, as he aimed with another seed, "this is poverty in New York City! Why, off the Bowery the Italians eat water-melon seeds for dessert. Watch me t'rowin' good grub out the window. Ping!"
Don bit a seed to taste it. "Poor beggers," he said.
"Poor nothing!" Pittsey cried. "I think they have the best of the bargain. There are more seeds than anything else in a water-melon, anyway."
VI
The Bowery is not only a 'Rogues* Highway"; it is, to the tenements of the East Side, what the theatre district of Broadway is to the rest of the city; and Don's "Musee" was a crude but honest house of amusement for the poor and for the slumming parties that came to see the poor amused. It was not one of those "fake fronts"—as Tower had called them—which allure the morbidly curious with promises of an indecent exhibition and turn them out a side door, disappointed. Nevertheless, it lived in the heart of a pollution which slowly—as Don slowly realized it—repelled and saddened while it puzzled him. Here was life reduced to its lowest terms of bestiality: vice without its disguising glitter, suffering that had no illusion to make it noble, and crime miserable in its own hell. Where did this inferno find its place in the scientific universe that
