eard
that the baby on the first floor was ill and had gone down there to
see if there was anything she might do for it. Until then she had seen
nothing but the outside of the other doors from the hall and they
looked no different from our own. But once inside--well I guess that's
where the two hundred years if not the four hundred years back of us
native Americans counts.

"Why, Billy," she cried, "it was awful. I'll never get that picture
out of mind if I live to be a hundred."

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Why the poor little thing--"

"What poor little thing?" I interrupted.

"Michele's baby. It lay there in dirty rags with its pinched white
face staring up at me as though just begging for a clean bed."

"What's the matter with it?"

"Matter with it? It's a wonder it isn't dead and buried. The district
nurse came in while I was there and told me,"--she shuddered--"that
they'd been feeding it on macaroni cooked in greasy gravy. And it
isn't six months old yet."

"No wonder it looked white," I said, remembering how we had discussed
for a week the wisdom of giving Dick the coddled white of an egg at
that age.

"Why the conditions down there are terrible," cried Ruth. "Michele
must be very, very poor. The floor wasn't washed, you couldn't see out
of the windows, and the clothes--"

She held up her hands unable to find words.

"That _does_ sound bad," I said.

"It's criminal. Billy--we can't allow a family in the same house with
us to suffer like that, can we?"

I shook my head.

"Then go down and see what you can do. I guess we can squeeze out
fifty cents for them, can't we, Billy?"

"I guess you could squeeze fifty cents out of a stone for a sick
baby," I said.

The upshot of it was that I went down and saw Michele. As Ruth had
said his quarters were anything but clean but they didn't impress me
as being in so bad a condition as she had described them. Perhaps my
work in the ditch had made me a little more used to dirt. I found
Michele a healthy, temperate, able-bodied man and I learned that he
was earning as much as I. Not only that but the women took in
garments to finish and picked up the matter of two or three dollars a
week extra. There were five in the family but they were far from being
in want. In fact Michele had a good bank account. They had all they
wanted to eat, were warm and really prosperous. There was absolutely
no need of the dirt. It was there because they didn't mind it. A fi