life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the
house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
question and without a smile.

"What kind of work do you do?" I asked, thinking to interest her while I
made ready.

"I scrubs," she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
scrubbed came out clean.

[Illustration: "I SCRUBS."--KATIE, WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN WEST FORTY-NINTH
STREET.]

Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
stoutly. Tony's, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came upon Tony
once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
as they went: "Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters." They meant no harm
and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.

The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
encompass as