the fourth: Louisa and Vincenzo were put in the "college," as the
Italians call the orphan asylum. The charity workers put them there in
order that they might have proper food and enough of it. Willow plumes
having become a drug in the market, the widow went into a factory, paying
a neighbor in the tenement a few cents a day for taking care of the baby
in her absence. As an unskilled hand she was able to earn a bare living.
One poor home, that was yet a happy home once, was wiped out. The widow's
claim against the railway company still waits upon the court calendar.[1]

[1] Her claim has since been settled for $1000.

Such as it is, it is society's present solution of the problem of the
widow Salvini. If any find fault with it, let them not blame the charity
workers, for they did what they could; nor the railway company, for its
ways are the ways of business, not of philanthropy; nor our highest court,
for we are told that impious is the hand that is stretched forth toward
that ark of the covenant of our liberties. Let them put the blame where it
belongs--upon us all who for thirty years have been silent under the
decision which forbade the abolition of industrial slavery in the Bohemian
cigar-makers' tenements because it would interfere with "the sacredness
and hallowed associations of the people's homes." That was the exact
phrase, if memory serves me right. Such was the sowing of our crop of
social injustice. Shall a man gather figs from thistles?

PETER

Miss Wald of the Nurses' Settlement told me the story of Peter, and I set
it down here as I remember it. She will forgive the slips. Peter has
nothing to forgive; rather, he would not have were he alive. He was all to
the good for the friendship he gave and took. Looking at it across the
years, it seems as if in it were the real Peter. The other, who walked
around, was a poor knave of a pretender.

This was Miss Wald's story:--

He came to me with the card of one of our nurses, a lanky, slipshod sort
of fellow of nineteen or thereabouts. The nurse had run across him begging
in a tenement. When she asked him why he did that, he put a question
himself: "Where would a fellow beg if not among the poor?" And now there
he stood, indifferent, bored if anything, shiftless, yet with some
indefinite appeal, waiting to see what I would do. She had told him that
he had better go and see me, and he had come. He had done his part; it was
up to me now.

He