ay, and played on
until he got good and ready to go. Then he went, and the old lady sat
down and wrote that letter, and gave it to Abigail to post.

[Illustration]

Later in the afternoon the old lady drove out, and the fresh air did her
a world of good, and she stopped at a toy store and bought some trifles
for sister Mary's little girl, who had the measles. Then she came home,
and after dinner she read Mr. Jacob Riis's book, "How the Other Half
Lives;" and she shuddered at the picture of the Jersey Street slums on
the title page, and shuddered more as she read of the fourteen people
packed in one room, and of the suffering and squalor and misery of it
all. And then she made a memorandum to give a larger check to the
charitable society next time. Then she went to bed, not forgetting first
to read her nightly chapter in the gospel of the carpenter's son of
Nazareth. And she had quite forgotten all about the coarse and
unchristian words she had written in the letter that was by that time
passing through the hands of the weary night-shift of mail-clerks down
in the General Post-office. And when she did read it in print, she was
so pleased and proud of the fluency of her own diction, and so many of
her nephews and nieces said so many admiring things about what she might
have done if she had only gone in for literature, that it really never
occurred to her at all to think whether she had been any more just and
charitable than the poor ignorant man who had annoyed her.

She was especially pleased with the part that had the legal phraseology
in it, and with the scornful rebuke of the police for their
unwillingness to disobey municipal ordinances. That was founded partly
on something that she had heard nephew John say once, and partly on a
general idea she has that the present administration has forcibly
usurped the city government.

Now, I have no doubt that when that organ-grinder went home at night, he
and his large family laid themselves down to rest in a back room of the
Jersey Street slum, and if it be so, I may sometimes see him when I look
out of a certain window of the great red-brick building where my office
is, for it lies on Mulberry Street, between Jersey and Houston. My own
personal and private window looks out on Mulberry Street. It is in a
little den at the end of a long string of low-partitioned offices
stretching along the Mulberry Street side; and we who tenant them have
looked out of the windows for so