Beth murmured an assent, but she was too much occupied with the new scenes before her to do more. Rapidly the New York she knew was changing into something as different from itself as her old home was different from it. Shabbiness was creeping over it like a sort of cloudy twilight. The buildings looked battered; so did the people passing them, and swarms of children, who were too small to go to school and too small to play on the sidewalk, were nevertheless playing there in every block. “It’s here,” announced Anna Mary when the cab stopped. She helped Beth out, gathered up her skirts and gingerly led the way into a tenement house. “Try not to touch the railin’, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary, mounting the stairs. Anna Mary knocked at a door which proved to be the right one. It was opened by a woman dressed in bright colors, gold hoops in her ears; a black-eyed baby, held against her shoulder, frowned timidly at the sight of strangers. The woman seemed to speak little English, but to understand perfectly what Anna Mary said when she explained slowly, in carefully chosen words, that Beth was the little girl who had been the means of saving Annunciata from arrest as a thief and that Annunciata was to come on Christmas eve to a tree at Beth’s home. Anna Mary laid down a card that bore Mr. Cortlandt’s name and address, explaining that this was to tell Annunciata where to go. “Ye-es, a-tanka you. I not speeka, Annunciata speeka. I un’erstan’, no speeka, me. Annunciata glada go see. Lika lil’ lady moocha, say great times tanka she. Annunciata coma sure--sure!” said the woman with a smile that revealed two rows of gleaming white teeth. Beth smiled her best to supply deficiencies in the conversation, but the room looked dreary to her, though it was not half as bad as those she was to see later. Some attempt at decking it had been made. A bright lithograph of Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia hung on one side of the room, on the other another high colored lithograph of the crucifixion. Paper flowers and a decorated candle stood on a shelf beside the first picture; there was something besides mere eating and drinking and their scarcity here, but poverty was written plain on the room. Beth felt a shocked pity, as if New York, which had been so abundantly kind to her, was not hospitable to these emigrants.