“Yes,” said the ragpicker, “I bide here, dearie, and I just want to step inter my place one minnit to get my bunnit to put on my head, to dress myself up in it, you know, so as to be decent to go afore genteel folks like your lady is.” She stopped before the very worst of all the rookeries in that alley, if that could be said of a house in a place where all houses were as bad as bad could be, and every one worse than the other—so to speak. “Come along o’ me, Fine Feathers,” said the hag, leading the unfortunate child up a short flight of rickety, shaking steps, and through a front door that stood wide open, into a hall that was even a little more filthy than the alley from which they had entered. The only light within it gleamed through partly open doors of tenement rooms on either side, with interiors indescribably squalid, and from which came odors insupportably nauseous. The tenement, in fact, seemed to be a colony of ragpickers. The dim, gleaming light from the doors ajar showed a narrow, moldering, broken staircase that led to the floor above. “Come along o’ me now, dearie,” said the crone, in a coaxing tone, as she took a faster hold on the child’s hand and began to draw her up the stairs. “Oh!—if you please—do take me—out of this—I—I—am dy—dy——” And here Owlet fainted away, succumbing to the weakness of an imperfect convalescence, to great weariness, and, finally, to the deadly fetor of the pestilential house. “There! by jingo!” exclaimed the crone, as she picked up the child, still very thin and light from her recent illness, and easily carried her up the rickety stairs, that creaked and bent under her footsteps, to the upper hall, which was flanked each side by tenement rooms, through whose partly open doors gleamed flickering lights and streamed foul odors. “This here is better nor I could ’oped. Saves a desprit deal o’ trouble,” said the ragpicker, as she bore the unconscious child to the rear of the hall, and paused at a door on the lefthand side, which she pushed open with her foot. It gave into a very small room, no bigger than a good-sized closet. It had but one window, a small, rear window, partly lighted by a distant lamp that stood in line with it on a cross street. The only furniture consisted of a huge pile of inconceivably foul rags that lay on the floor in one corner, reached halfway up to the low ceiling, and spread more than halfway over the floor. The woman laid the child down on the edge of the pile of rags, and found a match and an end of candle, which she lighted and stuck into the neck of an empty beer bottle.