got to move!_"

Mrs. Louder dropped into a chair and gasped. The baby, who had fallen
asleep, stirred uneasily. It was not a pretty child; its face was heavy,
its little cheeks were roughened by the wind, its lower lip sagged,
its chin creased into the semblance of a fat old man's. But Jane Louder
gazed down on it with infinite compassion. She stroked its head as she
spoke.

"Tilly," said she, "I've been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me, ever
since it was built; and, some way, between us we've managed to keep
the run of all the folks in it; at least when they were in any trouble.
We've worked together like sisters. She's 'Piscopal, and I guess I'm
Unitarian; but never a word between us. We tended the Willardses through
diphtheria and the Hopkinses through small-pox, and we steamed and
fumigated the rooms together. It was her first found out the Dillses
were letting that twelve-year-old child run the gasoline stove, and
she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing, and they begged off; and when it
exploded we put it out together, with flour out of her flour-barrel, for
the poor, shiftless things hadn't half a sack full of their own; and her
and me, we took half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that
was always sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child.
He's took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now. No, Tilly, I
couldn't bring myself to leave this building, where I've married them,
and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with so many of their
mothers; I feel like they was all my children. Don't ASK me."

Tilly's head went upward and backward with a little dilatation of the
nostrils. "Now, mother," said she in a voice of determined gentleness,
"just listen to me. Would I ask you to do anything that wouldn't be for
your happiness? I have found a real pretty house up on Fifteenth Street;
and we'll keep house together, just as cosey; and have a woman come to
wash and iron and scrub, so it won't be a bit hard; and be right on the
street-cars; and you won't have to drudge helping Mrs. Carleton extra
times with her restaurant."

"But, Tilly," eagerly interrupted Mrs. Louder, "you know I dearly love
to cook, and she PAYS me. I couldn't feel right to take any of the
pension money, or the little property your father left me, away from
the house expenses; but what I earn myself, it is SUCH a comfort to give
away out of THAT."

Tilly ran over and kissed the agitated face. "You dear, gene