bore down on her in
pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun that
pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on old
Boreas--it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her skirt
was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into her
alley. It peeped after her half-way down its dark depths, where it
seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
her.

It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall where
no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way in there
had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl with the
pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of children,
half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs and
bedsteads that encumbered the next--house-cleaning going on in that
"flat;" that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being burned out with
petroleum and a feather--up still another, past a half-open door through
which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and quickened
her step a little until she stood panting before a door on the fourth
landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare foot.

A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name of
furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three legs,
beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning against the
wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with dirty bed-tick
for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of the room; a crazy
stove, and back 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 millionaire
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 backyard, 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 hundred 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 liv