on each bedside stand.

She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz"
in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth
always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all
the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a
shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the
hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white
gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the
queen herself in regalness and authority.

The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed.
"Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.

Liz meditated majestically.

"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."

"Why?"

Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.

"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets
through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears
last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she
hopes she and the kid'll both die."

The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.

"Then she--isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she
flushed painfully.

Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her
eyes.

"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's
a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do.
Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't
he be always throwing it up to her?"

The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy
of life.

"Have--have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.

"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She
turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red
atom, so like the others that only mother love could have
distinguished it.

"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"

The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.

"He--he's very little," she said.

"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six
months--eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The
little devil!"

She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping
form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing
to say.

"Does--does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But
apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The
mandolin-player heard o