Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name, and my first errand that evening took me to her home, which was in the basement of a building on Boston Avenue. We were both concerned in pressing a claim which she had upon her husband’s people, a highly just claim, I thought; for he had deserted her some time before his death, leaving her alone in the support of herself and their two children. Why she had ever come to the city, I could never make clearly out, beyond what had seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her reason that, if she must make her own living and the children’s, she could hope to do it better in town than in the country where she was born and bred. And the marvel was that she had succeeded in keeping them all alive. The city had, of course, furnished an awful disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable barrier to employment at domestic service, and, failing to find any other labor, she was rescued finally from starvation by getting a job from a “sweater.” She deserved success, for she was an heroic creature. To hear her describe the struggle, you would gather that hers had been the best of luck. She merely wanted a chance to work, so that they might live; and had she not found it, just when she thought, for lack of it, that they must starve? From the sweater’s shop she would carry the goods two miles to her home, walking both ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then all day and through much of the night she made the garments. They were boys’ waists, and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary thread and buttons, were furnished her. There was left for her to do all the remaining work, down to sewing on the buttons and making the button-holes, and she was paid for the finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents a dozen. It was hard, she did admit, to feed and clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage-rate like that, and she was near to going under when another and a crowning stroke of fortune fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door, two women, who worked in a neighboring book-bindery, applied for board, and each agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five then lived together in the basement-room, whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the home and the children, and things had gone comfortably ever since. Gradually the children, a boy of nine and a girl two years younger, were learning to help at some of the simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.