But while he was completing arrangements at the beach we remained in town, where we enjoyed the educational advantages of a thickly populated neighborhood; namely, Wall Street, in the West End of Boston.
Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the wrong ends of that city.

They form the tenement district, or, in the newer phrase, the slums of Boston.

Anybody who is acquainted with the slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt, half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward politicians, the touchstone of American democracy.

The well-versed metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate of good citizenship.
He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk.

What would the sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall Street, where my new home waited for me?
He would say that it is no place at all, but a short box of an alley.