of him?"

"Oh! no one but God," said she, "and he is too busy with other folks to
give him much attention."

Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing
smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little
inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn
condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving
Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless
children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full
share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its
struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to
her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the
returns of the Children's Aid Society's lodging-houses as the gauge,
instead of increasing proportionally, has decreased nearly one-fifth; and
of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.

[Illustration: A SNUG CORNER ON A COLD NIGHT.]

If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the
general lot of the poor, we should be on the high road to the millennium.
But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of
organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible
principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run
down, and therefore concerns itself chiefly about the children. We are yet
a long, a very long way from a safe port. The menace of the Submerged
Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter's Field, and
though the "twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was
Christmas," but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction,
there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the
embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem
like a bitter mockery. Yet, when all is said, this much remains, that we
are steering the right course. Against the drift and the head-winds of an
unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of
Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and
the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at
last.

Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a
woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. What if there be a
thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong