et young and inexperienced girls
themselves. Improvidence! Yes. Early marriages are at the bottom of much
mischief among the poor. And yet perhaps these, and others like them,
might have offered the homes from which they went out, as a valid
defence. To their credit be it said that they accepted their lot
bravely, and, with the help of the alley, pulled through. Two of them
married again, and made a bad job of it. Second marriages seldom turned
out well in the alley. They were a refuge of the women from work that
was wearing their lives out, and gave them in exchange usually a tyrant
who hastened the process. There never was any sentiment about it. "I
don't know what I shall do," said one of the widows to me, when at last
it was decreed that the tenements were to be pulled down, "unless I can
find a man to take care of me. Might get one that drinks? I would hammer
him half to death." She did find her "man," only to have him on her
hands too. It was the last straw. Before the wreckers came around she
was dead. The amazed indignation of the alley at the discovery of her
second marriage, which till then had been kept secret, was beyond
bounds. The supposed widow's neighbor across the hall, whom we knew in
the front generally as "the Fat One," was so stunned by the revelation
that she did not recover in season to go to the funeral. She was never
afterward the same.

[Illustration: The Wrecking of Cat Alley.

_By permission of the Century Company._]

In the good old days when the world was right, the Fat One had enjoyed
the distinction of being the one tenant in Cat Alley whose growler never
ran dry. It made no difference how strictly Sunday law was observed
toward the rest of the world, the Fat One would set out from the alley
with her growler in a basket,--this as a concession to the unnatural
prejudices of a misguided community, not as an evasion, for she made a
point of showing it to the policeman on the corner,--and return with it
filled. Her look of scornful triumph as she marched through the alley,
and the backward toss of her head toward police headquarters, which
said plainly: "Ha! you thought you could! But you didn't, did you?" were
the admiration of the alley. It allowed that she had met and downed
Roosevelt in a fair fight. But after the last funeral the Fat One never
again carried the growler. Her spirit was broken. All things were coming
to an end, the alley itself with them.

One funeral I recall with a p