l. They were for the government, he said. He had not
the head to understand all the talk that was going on, but he gathered
from what he heard that the government was in trouble, and that somehow
it was about not having gold enough. So he had brought what he had. He
owed it all to the country, and now that she needed it he had come to
give it back.

The man was an Irishman. Very likely he was enrolled in Tammany and
voted its ticket. I remember a tenement at the bottom of a back alley,
over on the East Side, where I once went visiting with the pastor of a
mission chapel. Up in the attic there was a family of father and
daughter in two rooms that had been made out of one by dividing off the
deep dormer window. It was midwinter, and they had no fire. He was a
pedler, but the snow had stalled his push-cart, and robbed them of
their only other source of income, a lodger who hired cot room in the
attic for a few cents a night. The daughter was not able to work. But
she said, cheerfully, that they were "getting along." When it came out
that she had not tasted solid food for many days, was starving in
fact,--indeed, she died within a year, of the slow starvation of the
tenements that parades in the mortality returns under a variety of
scientific name which all mean the same thing,--she met her pastor's
gentle chiding with the excuse: "Oh, your church has many that are
poorer than I. I don't want to take your money."

These were Germans, ordinarily held to be close-fisted; but I found that
in their dire distress they had taken in a poor old man who was past
working, and kept him all winter, sharing with him what they had. He was
none of theirs; they hardly even knew him, as it appeared. It was enough
that he was "poorer than they," and lonely and hungry and cold.

[Illustration: The Children's Christmas Tree.]

It was over here that the children of Mr. Elsing's Sunday-school gave
out the depth of their poverty fifty-four dollars in pennies to be hung
on the Christmas tree as their offering to the persecuted Armenians. One
of their teachers told me of a Bohemian family that let the holiday
dinner she brought them stand and wait, while they sent out to bid to
the feast four little ragamuffins of the neighborhood who else would
have gone hungry. And here it was in "the hard winter" when no one had
work, that the nurse from the Henry Street settlement found her cobbler
patient entertaining a lodger, with barely bread in the hous