leasure which the years have in no way
dimmed. It was at a time before the King's Daughters' Tenement House
Committee was organized, when out-of-town friends used to send flowers
to my office for the poor. The first notice I had of a death in the
alley was when a delegation of children from the rear knocked and asked
for daisies. There was something unnaturally solemn about them that
prompted me to make inquiries, and then it came out that old Mrs. Walsh
was dead and going on her long ride up to Hart's Island; for she was
quite friendless, and the purse-strings of the alley were not long
enough to save her from the Potter's Field. The city hearse was even
then at the door, and they were carrying in the rough pine coffin. With
the children the crippled old woman had been a favorite; she had always
a kind word for them, and they paid her back in the way they knew she
would have loved best. Not even the coffin of the police sergeant who
was a brother of the district leader was so gloriously decked out as old
Mrs. Walsh's when she started on her last journey. The children stood in
the passageway with their arms full of daisies, and gave the old soul a
departing cheer; and though it was quite irregular, it was all right,
for it was well meant, and Cat Alley knew it.

They were much like other children, those of the alley. It was only in
their later years that the alley and the growler set their stamp upon
them. While they were small, they loved, like others of their kind, to
play in the gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to
dance to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though
they sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the
aldermen banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them,
too; certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty
sight to see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth
of the alley. Not rarely they had for an appreciative audience the big
chief himself, who looked down from his window, and the uniformed
policeman at the door. Even the commissioners deigned to smile upon the
impromptu show in breathing-spells between their heavy labors in the
cause of politics and pull. But the children took little notice of them;
they were too happy in their play. They loved my flowers, too, with a
genuine love that did not spring from the desire to get something for
nothing, and the parades on Italian feast-days that always