aithful unto
death" that record is added, nothing remains to be said. The firemen
know how much of that is the doing of their four-legged comrades. It
is the one blot on the fair picture that the city which owes these
horses so much has not seen fit, in gratitude, to provide comfort for
their worn old age. When a fireman grows old, he is retired on
half-pay for the rest of his days. When a horse that has run with the
heavy engines to fires by night and by day for perhaps ten or fifteen
years is worn out, it is--sold, to a huckster, perhaps, or a
contractor, to slave for him until it is fit only for the bone-yard!
The city receives a paltry two or three thousand dollars a year for
this rank treachery, and pockets the blood-money without a protest.
There is room next, in New York, for a movement that shall secure to
the fireman's faithful friend the grateful reward of a quiet farm, a
full crib, and a green pasture to the end of its days, when it is no
longer young enough and strong enough to "run with the machine."

JOHN GAVIN, MISFIT

John Gavin was to blame--there is no doubt of that. To be sure, he was
out of a job, with never a cent in his pockets, his babies starving,
and notice served by the landlord that day. He had travelled the
streets till midnight looking for work, and had found none. And so he
gave up. Gave up, with the Employment Bureau in the next street
registering applicants; with the Wayfarers' Lodge over in Poverty Gap,
where he might have earned fifty cents, anyway, chopping wood; with
charities without end, organized and unorganized, that would have sat
upon and registered his case, and numbered it properly. With all these
things and a hundred like them to meet their wants, the Gavins of our
day have been told often enough that they have no business to lose
hope. That they will persist is strange. But perhaps this one had
never heard of them.

Anyway, Gavin is dead. But yesterday he was the father of six
children, running from May, the eldest, who was thirteen and at
school, to the baby, just old enough to poke its little fingers into
its father's eyes and crow and jump when he came in from his long and
dreary tramps. They were as happy a little family as a family of eight
could be with the wolf scratching at the door, its nose already poking
through. There had been no work and no wages in the house for months,
and the landlord had given notice that at the end of the week, out
they must go,