rner,
the one large undeveloped bit of land still left, nearly in the center
of the whole tract. This was plastered with the signs of the realty
company, seductively offering to lease it for a term of years or improve
it with a building to suit tenant, etc.

"About all the open space and blue sky there is left!" the judge
remarked, pointing out the figures of a few dirty children who were
exploring a puddle and a pit of rubbish in the vacant lot. (These, I
suppose, were the descendants of that brave body of little hoodlums of
which I and my brothers were members years ago, and the puddle and pit
were all that was left of our mysterious playground!)

"There's a heap of cheap foreign rubbish all around here," the mason
growled, spitting contemptuously into the roadbed, as if he resented
that human beings could be found forlorn enough, low enough, to labor
under such conditions. "Not one of 'em looks as if he had had enough to
eat or knew what a good wash was or what the earth smells like!"

No, the Coast for him, and the sooner the better, too!

The judge smiled tolerantly, observing,--

"I don't suppose they have much chance to bathe here. The city cannot
afford to put up public baths and employers rarely think of those
things."

"Look at the rotten stuff they eat!" The mason pointed disdainfully to
the tipcarts drawn up along the curb, where men and women were
chaffering over dried fish and forlorn vegetables that would have soured
the soul of old Adams, who once raised celery on this very spot. "Don't
the folks in these parts eat better than that?"

"Not generally," the judge replied. "We have no public market in this
city, and it is very difficult for the poorer sort to get fresh food."

"You'd oughter see the California markets!" the young man bragged.

"Tell me about them," the judge said.

And while the young mason expatiated on his land of plenty where the
poor man could still enjoy his own bit of God's sunlight and fresh fruit
and flowers from the earth, Adelle watched the thick stream of workers
in Clark's Field, pushing and dawdling along the narrow street. There
were girls with bare arms and soiled shirt-waists and black skirts,
there were lean, pale boys, and women old before their time, hurrying
from tenement to shop, their hearts divided between the two cares of
home and livelihood. Adelle recalled one of her first talks with the
stone mason, in which he had crudely told her that her yearly incom