ruck her beautiful forehead,
and the blood was trickling down the white drawn face. He was hurling
himself against the mob in a vain effort to reach her side, and while
the crowd laughed and mocked, an officer mounted the steps and, instead
of driving the mob back, began to strike her furiously with his club.

Stuart waked with a cry--pressed his head and looked about the room,
bewildered. The tip of a swinging limb was pounding against his window
pane.

He opened the window quickly and broke the twig.

"What a nightmare!" he exclaimed, with a shiver.

For hours its horror haunted his imagination.

He dressed and started to his club for dinner, changed his mind and
turned down Broadway for the old Cafe Boulevard on Second Avenue. He
stopped again in front of the dingy Bible House at the head of the
Bowery and watched the flood of shopgirls and clerks passing across the
street from the department stores. What an endless throng! Hundreds,
thousands, and tens of thousands, men and women, girls and boys,
hurrying homeward. He had never noticed them before--this mighty host
of three hundred thousand women and five hundred thousand men who rush
into these swarming hives every morning and stream out again in the
gathering dusk of spring and the deepening nights of winter.

For the first time they seemed human beings who might have hopes and
fears, joys and sorrows, even as he.

How strange the world began to look through the new eyes of pity a
great sorrow had given him. How worn the faces of these children. They
must be horribly overworked. What a pitiful, starved life for a child.
He thought of his own childhood, and saw himself with swift bare feet
roaming the open fields of the South.

He was struck with the wistful faces of the very young girls--eager and
wise beyond their years. What an incongruous thing this mingling of the
tense eagerness of young girlhood in the straight open stare of worldly
wisdom with which some of them looked at him, and, passing, turned to
look again. It made him shiver. They ought to be at school, these
children; why were they here, jostling, elbowing, and fighting their
way through this crowd? A floor walker passed, holding a pretty girl's
arm. His position was unmistakable. No other man strolls through the
world with just his step and just his elevation of chin--a chin that
will hold its angle in death. Among the hurrying throng that jostled by
were men and women with the deep cut lin