nd the only air reached it through the door at the
bottom of the steps.

The girl was evidently asleep, and, after one more glance, Mary turned
with a shudder and hurried back up the steps. She hesitated to make a
second attempt but nerved herself to it by the thought of the questions
Sandford Berry was sure to ask of her. On the first floor she knocked at
several doors, and although she found no clue to the old lace knitter,
she soon found a welcome from a voluble old Irish woman, who hospitably
invited her in. Her eyes were that bad, she explained, that she couldn't
see to do much. Her family worked in the factory all day, and she was
glad of some one to talk to.

The door into the hall stood open, and presently another woman strayed
in, scenting entertainment of some kind, and then a much younger woman
followed, a slatternly creature with a sickly looking baby in her arms.
Old Mrs. Donegan talked freely of her neighbors after Mary had tactfully
won her confidence. She told her that most of them worked in the
factory. The Polish woman in the basement washed for some of the factory
hands, and although she worked all day and often far into the night, it
took nearly all she could make to pay the rent. There wasn't enough to
buy medicine for the girl, who was dying of consumption.

"Why don't they leave here and go out to the country?" asked Mary.
"People out there need help, and they could at least have clean water,
and clean grass to lie on. They'd be better off out under the trees than
in that basement."

Mrs. Donegan's dim eyes narrowed shrewdly. "Did you ever see a rat
caught in a trap?" she asked. "_It_ can't help itself. _It_ can't get
out. No more can they. They can't even speak English."

"Don't you go to telling the landlord we complained," whined the woman
with the baby. "He'd turn us out. Rents are so high everywhere that I
tramped for days to find this place. The others was worse than this."

Mary's evident friendliness and warmly expressed interest soon started
all three of the women to telling tales of Diamond Row. Mrs. Donegan's
were the worst, as she claimed the distinction of being the oldest
inhabitant. The one that aroused Mary's greatest indignation was of a
child which had been drowned in the cellar ten years ago. The inside
staircase going to the basement ran down over the cellar in some way,
and it was so rotten in parts that it gave way one day and he fell
through. It was in the spring, when