There was no snow in New York that Christmas Eve, but the wind seemed colder for that, as it blew in sharp biting gusts through the dark streets and alleys, and sweeping up a long flight of rickety stairs to one of those tenements where the poor live,—God only knows how,—crept through the wide cracks of a room where two little girls crouched before the fire, which the elder of them was trying to coax into a blaze. She had been out all day in the crowded streets offering her pins and shoe-lacings and matches, first to one and then to another of the gay throng hurrying by, all, or nearly all, in too great haste to notice her, shivering with cold and pinched with hunger though she was. Had they done so, they would have seen that she was no ordinary child, and her soft brown eyes, and sweet pale face, would have attracted attention to her at once. But it was the day before Christmas, and though money was spent by the thousands for toys which would please for an hour, and then lie idly upon some nursery floor, only twenty-five cents of it came to poor little Ruth, who wanted it so much, and whose eyes had in them a wistful, anxious look every time she offered her wares for sale. She did not tell a pitiful tale of her mother, dead six months before, or of the poverty and the sorrow, as one article after another was sold for food and fuel, until the comparatively comfortable home was bare of nearly everything, save the absolute necessities for daily use. Neither did she tell of her struggles to earn bread for herself and Rena, darling little five-years old Rena, whose eyes were like the violets of spring, and whose hair was golden in the sunshine, with a tinge of red upon it. Poor little Rena, who kept the house at home while Ruthy was away,—who washed the two plates and the one mug they shared between them, and swept the floor and washed the hearth, and wiped the dingy paint, as her mother had done when it was not as dingy as now, and did it more than once to pass away the long, lonely hours of Ruth’s absence. She had been told never to play with the children in the street, and her dead mother’s command was sacred to the conscientious child, who contented herself with looking from the windows of the fourth story, where she lived, down upon the moving, everchanging crowd in the narrow street below.