ing handle of the junk-cart.

Presently she raised her eyes and glanced across at the shelf with its
row of tin boxes marked "Bread," "Coffee," "Sugar." On the next shelf
was Grit's molasses jug. She arose and fumbled behind this, but
nothing was there--Grit's Bible was gone. Then she remembered, and
striking a match placed her cheek to the floor and found the grimy
book beneath the stationary washtubs. "Stone wall," she murmured,
"Grit was a stone wall." At the mantelpiece she caught a glimpse of
herself in the cracked little mirror, but she was too weary to care
what she looked like, too weary to notice that her hair was matted,
that grime and smudges made hollows in her cheeks, and that even her
nose seemed crooked.

She sank again into the chair beneath the screeching gas-jet. "Grit,"
she repeated dully, "was a stone wall." And between very honest,
tired, and lonely tears she began slowly to spell out the words of the
coverless book, having gained within the past few hours some
understanding of what it means in the battle of life to draw the sword
and throw away the scabbard.

There came another afternoon, another evening, another year, and still
another; but this narrative covers merely a part of two days--Great
Taylor's first and last as a junk-woman. The latter came nearly ten
years after the burial of Grit. For almost a decade Nell followed in
his grimy footprints and the polyglot people of the lower East Side,
looking down from their windows as she passed through the congested
streets pushing steadily with head bent, thought of her either as an
infinitesimal molecule at the bottom of the mass where the light of
idealism seldom penetrates or else as a female Colossus striding from
end to end of the Devil's Own city only ankle-deep in the debris from
which she wrested an existence. But to Great Taylor it seemed not to
matter what people thought. She sang her song through the cavernous
streets, the only song she knew: "Rags, old iron, bottles, and
ra-ags." She pounded with a huge, determined fist on alley gates, she
learned expertly to thread the traffic and to laugh at the teamsters,
their oaths, their curses. "They ain't so bad." And, finally,
bickering and bargaining with men of all classes, she came to wonder
why people called this the Devil's Own city. In all those years of
toil she did not once see him in the eyes of men. But there came the
day when she said, "I'm done."

On this day Great Taylor lifted