ing. 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
young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone upon her
breast. She went to the poor mother, and putting her hand soothingly on
her head knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The half-crazed
woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into tears and hid
her throbbing head in the other's lap.

The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the children
gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from her basket
bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting, wistful look into the
bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a moment about
the coping outside and fled over the house-tops.

As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an
Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes?" An army of
thousands whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home,
is that pove