[Illustration: "EVERYBODY HELPED GREASE THE HILL I WAS SLIDING DOWN. I SOON REACHED THE BOTTOM"] "We used to have Friday evening dances in our neighborhood, which I attended with my classmates. My but I loved to dance! It got so that Friday evening wasn't enough, so many a time found me with some of them at a hall down-town enjoying the public dance. The school-dance was always private. It didn't take long for some one to turn my silly head and make me believe he was dead in love with me. What did a little fifteen-year-old fool like me know, with no mother to teach her, and no woman to take a real interest? That wretch could fill me with, and make me believe, the biggest lies you ever imagined, and I drank it all in as though it were gospel truth. To this day I sometimes wonder if all men are liars. "I'm not going to mince matters. I fell; and pretty soon _everybody was helping to grease the hill I was sliding down. In consequence, I soon reached the bottom._" "Some one told father; but I denied everything, yet I was so afraid he would make the statements be proven, that in my fright I ran away, and I have never seen him since. He's dead now. Poor father! I expert that, with his other sorrows, this trouble finished him. "Two years later found me in just such a place as you have discovered me today. One afternoon, a sweet-faced Salvation Army lassie called. She talked as only you people can talk. I was but seventeen, still tender-hearted (wish I was yet); so it was not difficult to yield to her earnest persuasions to kneel beside her while she prayed. There was another girl in the room at the time, but she had a caller, so got up and went out. I learnt my first prayer from that Salvation Army girl. It was 'Our Father.' I used to see it framed on a wall in a house where my mother visited, but never did I understand it till that day. Then she asked me to talk to God in my own way. I felt sorry for what I'd done, and the life I was leading, and said so; so when she explained how God would forgive me, I believed her and told her I'd quit if she'd take me away, and she did. I left with her about dusk. She took me to her lodgings and for several days I shared her bed and board, until she got me a situation to do light housework at fifteen dollars a month. Light indeed! It was the heaviest, washing included; but I did as she suggested--prayed to God to help me as I worked, and he did. They were Jewish people and so did their own cooking; otherwise I couldn't have kept my job. "Never shall I forget the joy of receiving my first month's wages. As I looked at that little sum in my calloused hand, I said, 'Dollie, it's the first honest money you ever earned; doesn't it make you feel good?' "Before long my Salvation Army friend was called away to another field of labor. I promised to write to her, and to this day I am sorry that through my own carelessness I lost track of her. But I always did hate to write letters, so it's all my own fault.