unless the back rent was paid. And there was about as
much likelihood of its being paid as of a slice of the February sun
dropping down through the ceiling into the room to warm the shivering
Gavin family.

It began when Gavin's health gave way. He was a lather and had a
steady job till sickness came. It was the old story: nothing laid
away--how could there be, with a houseful of children--and nothing
coming in. They talk of death-rates to measure the misery of the slum
by, but death does not touch the bottom. It ends the misery. Sickness
only begins it. It began Gavin's. When he had to drop hammer and
nails, he got a job in a saloon as a barkeeper; but the saloon didn't
prosper, and when it was shut up, there was an end. Gavin didn't know
it then. He looked at the babies and kept up spirits as well as he
could, though it wrung his heart.

He tried everything under the sun to get a job. He travelled early and
travelled late, but wherever he went they had men and to spare. And
besides, he was ill. As they told him bluntly, sometimes, they didn't
have any use for sick men. Men to work and earn wages must be strong.
And he had to own that it was true.

Gavin was not strong. As he denied himself secretly the nourishment he
needed that his little ones might have enough, he felt it more and
more. It was harder work for him to get around, and each refusal left
him more downcast. He was yet a young man, only thirty-four, but he
felt as if he was old and tired--tired out; that was it.

The feeling grew on him while he went his last errand, offering his
services at saloons and wherever, as he thought, an opening offered.
In fact, he thought but little about it any more. The whole thing had
become an empty, hopeless formality with him. He knew at last that he
was looking for the thing he would never find; that in a cityful where
every man had his place he was a misfit with none. With his dull brain
dimly conscious of that one idea, he plodded homeward in the midnight
hour. He had been on the go since early morning, and excepting some
lunch from the saloon counters, had eaten nothing.

The lamp burned dimly in the room where May sat poring yet over her
books, waiting for papa. When he came in she looked up and smiled,
but saw by his look, as he hung up his hat, that there was no good
news, and returned with a sigh to her book. The tired mother was
asleep on the bed, dressed, with the baby in her arms. She had lain
down to qu