of it a door or gap opening upon
darkness. There was something in there, but what it was could only be
surmised from a heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the
bedroom of the apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented
at a price a millionnaire would denounce as robbery.

"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over
the stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."

The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
hopeless effort to cheer the back yard, might have peeped through the
one window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not
been coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner party in
action. It might have found a score like it in the alley. Four unkempt
children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother,
Mrs. McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut"
from the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread
and beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why
not? It was the one relish the searching ray would have found there.
Potatoes were there, too--potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the
tenements are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get
work and have not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a
job, say those who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and
getting charity in eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity
Organization. Any one can go round and see for himself that no one
need starve in New York.

From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
into the lid of a soap box that was partly filled with straw.
Something else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the
glimpse of sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby
in a white slip, bedded in straw in a soap box for a coffin. The man
was hammering down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the
bed knelt the mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had
killed her child. Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the
corner, hardly daring to whisper as they looked from the father to the
mother in terror.

There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the
noise of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently,
and a yo