had met him and observed his plan of "keeping close" to
the people. Against it not the most carping reform critic could have
found just ground of complaint.

The charity of the alley was contagious. With the reporters' messenger
boys, a harum-scarum lot, in "the front," the alley was not on good
terms for any long stretch at a time. They made a racket at night, and
had sport with "old man Quinn," who was a victim of dropsy. He was
"walking on dough," they asseverated, and paid no attention to the
explanation of the alley that he had "kidney feet." But when the old man
died and his wife was left penniless, I found some of them secretly
contributing to her keep. It was not so long after that that another old
pensioner of the alley, suddenly drawn into their cyclonic sport in the
narrow passageway, fell and broke her arm. Apparently no one in the lot
was individually to blame. It was an unfortunate accident, and it
deprived her of her poor means of earning the few pennies with which she
eked out the charity of the alley. Worse than that, it took from her
hope after death, as it were. For years she had pinched and saved and
denied herself to keep up a payment of twenty-five cents a week which
insured her decent burial in consecrated ground. Now that she could no
longer work, the dreaded trench in the Potter's Field yawned to receive
her. That was the blow that broke her down. She was put out by the
landlord soon after the accident, as a hopeless tenant, and I thought
that she had gone to the almshouse, when by chance I came upon her
living quite happily in a tenement on the next block. "Living" is hardly
the word; she was really waiting to die, but waiting with a cheerful
content that amazed me until she herself betrayed the secret of it.
Every week one of the messenger boys brought her out of his scanty wages
the quarter that alike insured her peace of mind and the undisturbed
rest of her body in its long sleep, which a life of toil had pictured to
her as the greatest of earth's boons.

Death came to Cat Alley in varying forms, often enough as a welcome
relief to those for whom it called, rarely without its dark riddle for
those whom it left behind, to be answered without delay or long
guessing. There were at one time three widows with little children in
the alley, none of them over twenty-five. They had been married at
fifteen or sixteen, and when they were called upon to face the world and
fight its battles alone were y