ore the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first
journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the
Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it
had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual
spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough"
and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our
grandfather's student days.

What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last
twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further
barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle
on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with
fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my
slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred.
Through the thin mattress I could feel the slats, that seemed hard
bands of pain across my tired body.

From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart,
now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to
retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had
imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring--this
coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been
teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I
recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter
nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the
farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my
rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about
girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of
what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite
certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come
at all.

I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and
the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's
breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the
bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging
black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was
the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral
fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all
about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty
windows of