with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
sentenced to four years' imprisonment. That was how he got into "the pen."

Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
saloons of the Tenth Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.

Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
"had a pull with the night watch," she told me, and she was kept there
three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.

The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
her friend went to see how she was getting on.

"Rum killed her, I suppose," I said, when Fay had ended her story.

"Yes! I suppose it did."

"And you," I ventured, "some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
out."

The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.

"Me?" she said, "not by a jugful. I've been soaking it fifteen years and I
am alive yet."

The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
Street.

Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff's girl.

CHAPTER VI.

THE LITTLE TOILERS

Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
has not been said better since: "The destruction of the poor is their
poverty."

It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
child