d.

They were evenly matched. Sheeny Rose made up in superior suppleness
of limb for the pent-up malice of the other. Grace aimed her thrusts
at her opponent's face. She tried to reach her eye. Once the sharp
steel just pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood. In the next
turn Rose's hatpin passed within a quarter-inch of Grace's jugular.

But the blow nearly threw her off her feet, and she was at her
enemy's mercy. With an evil oath the fiend thrust full at her face
just as the policeman, who had come through the crowd unobserved, so
intent was it upon the fight, knocked the steel from her hand.

At midnight two dishevelled hags with faces flattened against the bars
of adjoining cells in the police station were hurling sidelong curses
at each other and at the maddened doorman. Nigger Martha's wake had
received its appropriate and foreordained ending.

WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS

The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon
rich and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the
avenues and in the up-town streets, and into courts and alleys hedged
in by towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy
holiday shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying
bundles big and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and
kindly messages from Santa Claus.

It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't
it a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder cape to a
friend, pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.

"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
sun up on the avenue.

Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was
in them, and fell into a dirty block, half choked with trucks, with
ash barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, barefooted
and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in
her grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like
the draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the
alley it took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of