dge was obliged to give in gracefully. A policeman showed the girls to
a Twenty-third Street car. He explained that when they came to the Third
Avenue L they must get out of the car and take the elevated train uptown,
since Madge had explained to him that Mrs. Curtis lived on Seventieth
Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues.

There was only one point that the policeman failed to make clear to
Eleanor and Madge. He neglected to tell them that elevated trains, as
well as other cars, travel both up and down New York City, and the way to
discover which way the "L" train is moving is to consult the signs on the
steps that lead up to the elevated road. The policeman supposed that the
two young women would make this observation for themselves. Of course,
under ordinary circumstances, Madge and Nellie would have been more
sensible, but they were frightened and confused at the bare idea of being
alone in New York and consequently lost their heads, and they dashed up
the Third Avenue elevated steps without looking for signs, settled
themselves in the train and were off, as they supposed, for Seventieth
Street.

They were too much interested in gazing into upstairs windows, where
hundreds of people were at work in tiny, dark rooms, to pay much
attention to the first stops at stations that their train made. They knew
they were still some distance from Mrs. Curtis's. Madge was completely
fascinated at the spectacle of a fat, frowsy woman holding a baby by its
skirt on the sill of a six-story tenement house. Just as the car went by
the baby made a leap toward the train. Madge smothered her scream as the
woman jerked the child out of danger just in time. Then it suddenly
occurred to her that this was hardly the kind of neighborhood in which to
find Mrs. Curtis's house. The sign at the next stop was a name and not a
street number. It could not be possible that she and Eleanor had made
another mistake!

Madge hurried back to the end of the car to find the conductor.

"We wish to get out at the nearest station to Seventieth Street and
Lexington Avenue," she declared timidly.

The man paid not the slightest attention to her. Madge repeated her
question in a somewhat bolder tone.

"You ain't going to get off near Seventieth Street for some time if you
keep a-traveling away from it," retorted the conductor crossly. "You've
got on a downtown 'L' 'stead of an up. Better change at the next station.
You'll find an uptown train across t