de with the stars, a
city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy
childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.

Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came
the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill
in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of
thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings
of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying
monody--"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"

And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl
of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange
city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a
stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to
toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and
stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped
out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of
paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of
water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in
falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into
the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and
my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer
and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the
cold, stale water.

Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the
basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize
Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my
arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a faded French flannel
kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling
"kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front
of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due
allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono,
curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug
corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance,
respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss
Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted
to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to
which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable
and che