She claims to be an expert in beggars. She has certain tests that she applies to all comers. Her fundamental rule is that all applicants are entitled to cold bread on first call. After this she either grades them up to cake and preserves, or holds them to scraps. I remember that she kept Col. Nash on dry biscuit for thirteen months, while other applicants have gone up to pie in three visits. I never felt any hesitation in taking her judgment after that, for of all wheedling mendicants Col. Nash, the alleged scissors-grinder, takes the lead. But Jane was not a beggar. She carried on her arm a basket. It was filled with some useless articles that she wanted to sell. Would the lady look at them? Oh! of course! They were bits of splints embroidered with gay worsted. What were they for? Why, she didn’t know. She just thought somebody would buy them, and she needed some money so badly. “Who is your mother?” “I haven’t any. She is dead. I have a father, though.” “What does he do?” “He’s sick most of the time. He works when he is well.” “What’s his name?” “Robert ——!” (Saints! My “Bob!” Sick indeed! The weak rascal!) Jane was asked in, and I began to investigate. I learned that this child was literally alone in the world. She had a sister, a puny two-year-old, and a drunken father—my flabby friend. They lived in a rickety hovel, out of which the last chair had been sold to pay rent. The mother, a year an invalid, had been accustomed to work little trifles in splints and worsted. She dying, the child picked up the splints, and worked grotesque baby fancies in wood and worsted. She had no time for weeping. Her hunger dried her eyes. The cooing baby by her side, crying for bread, made her forget the dead mother. So she fashioned the splints together, and with a brave heart went out to sell them. Bob reformed at the bedside of his dying wife. Possibly at that moment the angels that had come to guide the woman home swept away the mist of the man’s debauch, and gave him a glimpse of the pure life that lay behind. Certain it is that his moist, uncertain hands crept vaguely up the cover till they caught the wasted cheeks of his wife, and his shaggy head bent down till his quivering lips found hers. And the poor wife, yielding once more to the love that had outlived shame and desertion, turned her eyes from her children and fixed them on her husband. Ah! how this earthly hope and this earthly love chased even the serenity of Heaven from her face, and lighted it with tender rapture! How quickly this drunkard supplanted God in the dying woman’s soul? “Oh, Bob! my darling!” she gasped, and raising her face toward him with a masterful yearning, she died. “Mother didn’t seem to know we were there after father came,” Jane told me. And I wondered if the child had not been hurt, that all her months of patient love and watching had been forgotten in a tempest of love for a vagabond husband that had wrought nothing but disaster and death.