s, miss, I've been there often."

"Well, then, this afternoon I'll go with you and see if I can do anything
for them."

[Decoration]

SCENE II.

An attic room, neat and clean, but poorly furnished; a bed and a trundle-
bed, a small cooking-stove, a shelf with a few dishes, one or two chairs
and stools, a pale, thin woman working on a vest.

Her face is anxious; her thin hands tremble with weakness, and now and
then, as she works, quiet tears drop, which she wipes quickly. Poor
people cannot afford to shed tears; it takes time and injures eyesight.

This is John Morley's wife. This morning he has risen and gone out in a
desperate mood. "No use to try," he says. "Didn't I go a whole year and
never touch a drop? And now just because I fell once I'm kicked out! No
use to try. When a fellow once trips, everybody gives him a kick. Talk
about love of Christ! Who believes it? Don't see much love of Christ
where I go. Your Christians hit a fellow that's down as hard as anybody.
It's everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. Well, I'll trudge
up to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and see if they'll take me on there--if they
won't I might as well go to sea, or to the devil," and out he flings.

"Mamma!" says a little voice, "what are we going to have for our
Christmas?"

It is a little girl, with soft curly hair and bright, earnest eyes, that
speaks.

A sturdy little fellow of four presses up to the mother's knee and
repeats the question, "Sha'n't we have a Christmas, mother?"

It overcomes the poor woman; she leans forward and breaks into sobbing,--
a tempest of sorrow, long suppressed, that shakes her weak frame as she
thinks that her husband is out of work, desperate, discouraged, and
tempted of the devil, that the rent is falling due, and only the poor pay
of her needle to meet it with. In one of those quick flashes which
concentrate through the imagination the sorrows of years, she seems to
see her little home broken up, her husband in the gutter, her children
turned into the street. At this moment there goes up from her heart a
despairing cry, such as a poor, hunted, tired-out creature gives when
brought to the last gasp of endurance. It was like the shriek of the hare
when the hounds are upon it. She clasps her hands and cries out, "O my
God, help me."

There was no voice of any that answered; there was no sound of foot-fall
on the staircase; no one entered the door; and yet that agonized cry had
reached