"Well, here's your key. Your man told me to tell you 't if you came while he was at work, you'd find something to eat in the back room 't he'd cooked this mornin' before he went to work. The train was late, he said, and he couldn't wait; but he'd be home to-night, and he'd bring some coal when he came. What a fine lot o' children you have. They ought to keep you in cinders and wood. I wish I had some as big as that; but mine are all little. My two eldest died of scarlet fever two years ago. Drainage, they said." She had come out and unlocked the door and was now turning away. "I think your man had someone to take the up-stairs front room; but he didn't come--you'll have to get someone to do it and you double up. The Argand Estate charges such rent, we all have to do that. Well, if I can help you, I'm right here." I was struck by her kindness to the forlorn stranger, and the latter's touching recognition of it, expressed more in looks and in tone than in words. Having helped them into the house, which was substantially empty, only one room having even a pretence of furniture in it, and that merely a bed, a mattress and a broken stove, I gave the poor woman a little of my slender stock of money and left her murmuring her thanks and assurances that I had already done too much for them. In fact, I had done nothing. * * * * * As my finances were very low, I determined to find a boarding-house instead of wasting them at a hotel. I accordingly stopped at a sizable house which I recognized as a boarding-house on a street in a neighborhood which might, from the old houses with their handsome doors and windows, have once been fashionable, though fashion had long since taken its flight to a newer and gaudier part of the town, and the mansions were now giving place to shops and small grocers' markets. A wide door with a fan-shaped transom gave it dignity. A large wistaria vine coiled up to the top of a somewhat dilapidated porch with classical pillars lent it distinction. The landlady, Mrs. Kale, a pleasant looking, kindly woman, offered me a small back-room on reasonable terms, it being, as she said, the dull season; and, having arranged for Dix in a dingy little livery stable near by, I took it "temporarily," till I could look around. I found the company somewhat nondescript--ranging all the way from old ladies with false fronts and cracked voices to uppish young travelling men and their rather sad-looking wives.