But the wagon was already moving out of the alley, and Nance suddenly ceased to struggle. An accidental combination of circumstances, too complicated and overwhelming to be coped with, was hurrying her away to some unknown and horrible fate. She looked at her mud-splashed white slippers that were not yet paid for, and then back at the bright window behind which the party was waiting. In a sudden anguish of disappointment she flung herself face downward on the long seat and sobbed with a passion that was entirely too great for her small body. Sitting opposite, his stiff, stubby hair sticking out beneath his pirate hat, Dan Lewis, forgetting his own misfortune, watched her with dumb compassion, and between them, on the floor, lay a drunken hulk of a man with blood trickling across his ugly, bloated face, his muddy feet resting on all that remained of a gorgeous, tinsel crown. It was at this moment that the Christmas spirit fled in despair from Calvary Alley and took refuge in the big cathedral where, behind the magnificent new window, a procession of white-robed choir-boys, led by Mac Clarke, were joyously proclaiming: "Hark! the herald angels sing Glory to the new-born King;" CHAPTER XI THE STATE TAKES A HAND The two reformatories to which the children, after various examinations, were consigned, represented the worst and the best types of such institutions. Dan Lewis was put behind barred windows with eight hundred other young "foes of society." He was treated as a criminal, and when he resented it, he was put under a cold shower and beaten with a rattan until he fainted. Outraged, humiliated, bitterly resentful, his one idea was to escape. At the end of a month of cruelty and injustice he was developing a hatred against authority that would ultimately have landed him in the State prison had not a miraculous interference from without set him free and returned him to his work in Clarke's Bottle Factory. It all came about through a letter received by Mrs. Purdy, who was wintering in Florida--a tear-stained, blotted, misspelled letter that had been achieved with great difficulty. It ran: Dear Mis Purdy, me and Dan Lewis is pinched again. But I ain't a Dellinkent. The jedge says theres a diffrunce. He says he was not puting me in becose I was bad but becose I was not brot upright. He says for me to be good and stay here and git a education. He says its my chanct. I was mad at first, but now I aint. What Im writing you fer is to git Dan Lewis out. He never done nothink what was wrong and he got sent to the House of Refuse. Please Mis Purdy you git him off. He aint bad. You know he aint. You ast everbody at home, and then go tell the Jedge and git him off. I can't stan fer him to be in that ole hole becose it aint fair. Please don't stop at nothink til you git him out. So good-by, loveingly, NANCE.