"They're kind folks and good neighbours," Mrs. Brown explains, "but they're different from us. They eat what the rest of us throw away, and there's no work they won't do. They're putting money aside fast; most of 'em owns their own houses; but since they've moved into this neighbourhood the price of property's gone down. I don't have nothing to do with 'em. We don't any of us. They're not like us; they're different."

Without letting a day elapse I started early the following morning in search of a new job. The paper was full of advertisements, but there was some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a place, as I was an unskilled hand. There was, however, one simple "Girls wanted!" which I answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing machine.

The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for eyes long used to poverty's quarters. Like a sea, it rolled white-capped waves toward the shore from its far-away emerald surface where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind's will. Free from man's disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a veil of morning mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of America's giant industries. In less than an hour I am receiving wages from a large picture frame company in East Lake Street. Once more I have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses than women. The woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like Frances, is always annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be done her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people's business. Aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided you get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what methods you take in doing it. For the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not, you must do it her way. The overseer at J.'s picture frame manufactory is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me to coöperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him. My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his approval. The work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling me the different prices. The girls work generally in teams of three, dividing profits. Nothing could be more modern, more middle-class, more popular, more philistine than the production of J.'s workrooms. They are the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance of it. Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water colours are imitated in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are imitated in applications of pressed brass. Great works of art are belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest pocket. Framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby's crib in a Harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the piano in the front parlour. The range of subjects covers a familiar list of comedies or tragedies—the partings before war, the interior behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.

My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this many; but my comrades don't allow me to get discouraged.

"You're doing well," a red-haired vis-a-vis calls to me across the table. And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along, tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much better.

The hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.

The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all gifts—youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure. My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.

The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which passes before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured paper covered with glue. My vis-à-vis and I lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects are the same as elsewhere—dress, young men, entertainments. The girls have "beaux" and "steady beaux." The expression, "Who is she going with?" means who is her steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith now, but I don't know whether I'll keep him," means that Jim Smith is on trial as a beau and may become a "steady." They go to Sunday night subscription dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday, after having danced until early morning. "There's nothing so smart for a ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk waist."

About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve.

The light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and cheerful; one can make $7 to $8 a week.

The conditions at J.'s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return to get my apron or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw upon the resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural condition of life I wish to try one more place: a printing job. There are quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls needed to run presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my self-dismissal I start through the hot summer streets in search of a situation. On the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find policemen always as officially polite as when I am dressed in my best. Other people of whom I inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. Poor old women to whom I speak often call me "dear" in answering.

Under the trellis of the elevated road the "cables" clang their way. Trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge over the rough pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people who are dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke. The orderly rush of busy people, among whom I move toward an address given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles, followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses' hoofs have died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes business. The fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed against policemen's arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the perpetual veil of soot.

I compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger. Decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers correspond. But there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants only trained workers. "I'm real sorry," she says. "You're from the East, aren't you? I notice you speak with an accent."

By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I say:

"I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."

"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two girls engaged already."

"Too late!" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:

"Say, are you sure those girls'll come? You can't always count on us, you know."

He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon press?"

"No, sir; but I'm awful handy."

"Where have you been working?"

"At J.'s in Lake Street."

"What did you make?"

"A dollar a day."

"Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I'll tell you then whether I can give you anything to do."

"Can't you be sure now?"

Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.

"Well," the fat man says indulgently, "you come in to-morrow morning at eight and I'll give you a job."

The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying apprenticeship.

The noise of a single press is deafening. In the room where I work there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing machines back of them. On one side of the room only are there windows. The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer's ink and cheap paper. A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing coloured advertisements. The work is all done standing; the hours are from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty on Saturdays. It is to feed a machine that I am paid three dollars a week. The expression is admirably chosen. The machine's iron jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work. Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an afternoon's work.

Into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its place before the machine closes again. What a master to serve is this noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment's respite to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. The girls are pale. Their complexions without exception are bad.

We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and, seeing that I am ambitious, he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There is some complaining sotto voce of the other boss, who, it appears, is a hard taskmaster. Both are very young, both chew tobacco and expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor. While waiting for new type I get into conversation with the boss of ill-repute. He has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is communicative.

"Do you like your job?" he asks.

"Yes, first rate."

"They don't pay enough. I give notice last week and got a raise. I guess I'll stay on here until about August."

"Then where are you going?"

"Going home," he answers. "I've been away from home for seven years. I run away when I was thirteen and I've been knocking around ever since, takin' care of myself, makin' a livin' one way or another. My folks lives in California. I've been from coast to coast—and I tell you I'll be mighty glad to get back."

"Ever been sick?"

"Yes, twice. It's no fun. No matter how much licking a boy gets he ought never to leave home. The first year or so you don't mind it so much, but when you've been among strangers two years, three years, all alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you must get back to your own folks."

"Are you saving up?" I ask.

He nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco juice.

"I'll be able to leave here in August," he explains, when he has finished spitting, "for Omaha. In three months I can save up enough to get on as far as Salt Lake, and in another three months I can move on to San Francisco. I tell you," he adds, returning to his work, "a person ought never to leave home." He had nine months of work and privation before reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning for years. With what patience he appears possessed compared to our fretfulness at the fast express trains, which seem to crawl when they carry us full speed homeward toward those we love! Nine months, two hundred and seventy days, ten-hour working days, to wait. He was manly. He had the spirit of adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge of men extended; he had managed to take care of himself in one way or another for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy's life. He had not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound. His history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a nonentity—a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without individual brilliancy, added to the general luster.

The first day I had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new girl who started in when I did. From my machine I could see only the back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made and had to make over again. She had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back. If not actually stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their patience and would readily give up the job. I was pleased at being included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch time when the old girls, the habitués, came after me to eat with them. The girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self. Without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch. My moment of vanity had passed. I went over to her, not knowing whether her appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty. As we were both new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question:

"Like your job?"

I could not understand what she answered, so I continued: "Ever worked before?"

She opened her hands and held them out to me. In the palm of one there was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger. Two nails had been worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle. The whole was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black.

"Does that look like work?" was her response. It was almost impossible to hear what she said. Without a palate, she forced the words from her mouth in a strange monotone. She was one of nature's monstrous failures. Her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose; her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double scar. She kept her hand over her mouth when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp's midst reflecting blue sky.

"What was you doing to get your hands like that?" I asked.

"Tipping shoe-laces. I had to quit, 'cause they cut the pay down. I could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o'clock, and I didn't care how hard I worked so long as I got good pay—$9 a week. But the employer'd been a workman himself, and they're the worst kind. He cut me down to $4 a week, so I quit."

"Do you live home?"

"Yes. I give all I make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and board. Almost anywhere I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that much like I was doing right. But it's hard to work and make nothing. I'm slow to learn," she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, "but I'll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only I'm not very strong."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Heart disease for one thing, and then I'm so nervous. It's kind of hard to have to work when you're not able. To-day I can hardly stand, my head's aching so. They make the poor work for just as little as they can, don't they? It's not the work I mind, but if I can't give in my seven a week at home I get to worrying."

Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.

The machines began to roar and vibrate again. The noon recess was over. She went back to her job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her daily bread. Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of superiority. I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice, pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. She was one of nature's failures—one of God's triumphs.

Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of Mrs. Brown's. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed money alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we started together for the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its show-case windows. Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal, mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach, it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed.

The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public. Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving. From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted with envy and admiration. Did she not plainly say to them "For $17 you can look as I do"?

The store was apparently flourishing, and except for such few useful articles as stockings and shirts it was stocked with trash. Patronized entirely by labouring men and women, it was an indication to their needs. Here, for example, was a stand hung with silk dress skirts, trimmed with lace and velvet. They were made after models of expensive dress-makers and were attempts at the sort of thing a Mme. de Rothschild might wear at the Grand Prix de Paris.

Varying from $11 to $20, there was not one of the skirts made of material sufficiently solid to wear for more than a few Sunday outings. On another counter there were hats with extravagant garlands of flowers, exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps with ruffles of lace and long pendant bows; silk boleros; a choice of things never meant to be imitated in cheap quality.

I watched the customers trying on. Possessed of grace and charm in their native costumes, hatless, with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders, the Italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry garb of the luxury-loving labourer, were common like the rest. In becoming prosperous Americans, animated by the desire for material possession which is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the character that pleases us, the beauty we must go abroad to find.

Miss Arnold priced everything, compared quality and make with Jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed the effect any purchase could have made.

Sunday morning Mrs. Brown asked me to join her and Miss Arnold for breakfast They were both in slippers and dressing-gowns. We boiled the coffee and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes, which Miss Arnold kept in a paper bag in her room.

"I hardly ever eat, except between meals," she explained. "A nibble of cake or candy is as much as I can manage, my digestion is so poor."

"Ever since Brown died," the widow responded, "I've had my meals just the same as though he were here. All I want," she went on, as we seated ourselves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread and butter, "all I want is somebody to be kind to me. I've got a young niece that I've tried to have with me. I wrote to her and says: 'Your auntie's heart's just crying out for you!' And I told her I'd leave her all I've got. But she said she didn't feel like she could come."

As soon as breakfast is over the mundane member of the household starts off on a day's round of visits. When the screen door has shut upon her slender silhouette, Mrs. Brown settles down for a chat. She takes out the brush and comb, unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while she talks.

"Miss Arnold's always on the go; she's awful nervous. These society people aren't happy. Life's not all pleasure for them. You can be sure they have their ups and downs like the rest of us."

"I guess that's likely," is my response.

"They don't tell the truth always, in the first place. They say there's got to be deceit in society, and that these stylish people pretend all sorts of things. Well, then, all I say is," and she pricks the comb into the brush with emphasis, "all I say is, you better keep out of society."

She had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the back of her head, and dish-washing is now the order of the day. As we splash and wipe, Mrs. Brown looks at me rather closely. She is getting ready to speak. I can feel this by a preliminary rattle of her teeth.

"You're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't been long in Chicago. I just thought I'd tell you about a girl who was workin' here in the General Electric factory. She was sixteen—a real nice-lookin' girl from the South. She left her mother and come up here alone. It wasn't long before she got to foolin' round with one of the young men over to the factory. They were both young; they didn't mean no harm; but one day she come an' told me, cryin' like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her young man had slipped off up to Michigan."

Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested, and as I responded with a heartfelt "Oh, my!" she went on:

"Well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin', her loneliness for her mother. I'd come in her room sometimes at midnight—the very room you have now—and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart out. I want to tell you never to get discouraged. Just you listen to what happened. The gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn't by kindness. Well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin' to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the weddin' without tellin' her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin' right there," she pointed to the rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when he come in. He was carryin' a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long white ribbons. He offered 'em to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor at him. After awhile they went together into her room and talked for half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. He was real kind. He kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin' me for takin' care of her. They were married, and when the weddin' was over she didn't want to stay with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up between them."

She had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird and his cage. She put them on the table and prepared to give the bird his bath and fresh seed.

"You see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's what good employers will do for you. If you're working in a good place they'll do right by you, and it don't pay to get down-hearted."

I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story. Evidently I must account for my Sundays! It was with the bird now that Mrs. Brown continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van Winkle in plumage. His claws trailed over the sand of the cage. Except when Mrs. Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing in her part of the tenement.

"I've had him twenty-five years," she said to me. "Brown give him to me. I guess I'd miss him if he died." And presently she repeated again: "I don't believe I even know how much I'd miss him."

On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew must be open, as I felt a cold wind. The lake brought capricious changes of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the newcomer might be. The sight of him set my heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was questioning the man to find out who he was.... He was evidently nobody—a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into debris upon the edge of a city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for himself; the type par excellence who has worn out charity organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there were none of it left in the world. He was asking for food. The proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him away. He pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed, letting in a fresh gale of icy air. The man was gone. I turned back to my supper. Scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed all his feelings. Across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar, pale like the rest of his face. He was small and had sandy hair. The directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air over his scraggly red beard.

Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was visible.

"It's a cold night!" I began. "Are you out of a job?"

With his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance.

"I've been sick. There's a sharp pain right in through here." He showed me a spot under his arm. "They thought at the hospital that I 'ad consumption. But," his face brightened, "I haven't got it." He showed in his smile the life-warrant that kept him from suicide. He wanted to live.

"Where did you sleep last night?" I asked. "It was a cold night."

"To tell you the truth," he responded in his strong Scotch accent, "I slept in a wagon."

I proposed that we do some shopping together; he looked at me gratefully and limped along to a cheap clothing store, kept by an Italian. The warmth within was agreeable; there was a display of garments hung across the ceiling under the gas-light. My companion waited, leaning against the glass counter, while I priced the flannel shirts. To be sure, my own costume promised little bounty. The price of the shirt was seventy-five cents, and as soon as he heard this the poor man said:

"Oh, you mustn't spend as much as that."

Looking first at the pauper, then at me, the Italian leaned over and whispered to me, "I think I understand. You can have the shirt for sixty, and I'll put in a pair of socks, too."

Thus we had become a fraternity; all were poor, the stronger woe helping the weaker.... When his toilet was complete the poor man looked half a head taller.

"Shall I wrap up your old cap for you?" the salesman asked, and the other laughed a broken, long-disused laugh.

"I guess I won't need it any more," he said, turning to me.

His face had changed like the children's valentines that grow at a touch from a blank card to a glimpse of paradise.

Once in the street again we shook hands. I was going back to my supper. He was going, the charity directors would say, to pawn his shirt and coat.

The man had evidently not more than a few months to live; I was leaving Chicago the following day. We would undoubtedly never meet again.

As his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked straight at me. "Thank you," he said, and his last words were these:

"I'll stand by you."

It was a pledge of fraternity at parting. There was no material substance to promise. I took it to mean that he would stand by any generous impulses I might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability are linked together in humanity.