The Wiggses' house was the most imposing in the neighborhood. This was probably due to the fact that it had two front doors and a tin roof. One door was nailed up, and the other opened outdoors, but you would never guess it from the street. When the country house burned, one door had been saved. So Mrs. Wiggs and the boys brought it to the new home and skilfully placed it at the front end of the side porch. But the roof gave the house its chief distinction; it was the only tin roof in the Cabbage Patch. Jim and Billy had made it of old cans which they picked up on the commons. Jim was fifteen and head of the family; his shoulders were those of a man, and were bent with work, but his body dwindled away to a pair of thin legs that seemed incapable of supporting the burden imposed upon them. In his anxious eyes was the look of a bread-winner who had begun the struggle too soon. Life had been a tragedy to Jim: the tragedy that comes when a child's sensitive soul is forced to meet the responsibilities of manhood, yet lacks the wisdom that only experience can bring. Billy Wiggs was differently constituted; responsibilities rested upon him as lightly as the freckles on his nose. When occasion or his mother demanded he worked to good purposes with a tenacity that argued well for his future success, but for the most part he played and fought and got into trouble with the aptitude characteristic of the average small boy. It was Mrs. Wiggs's boast that her three little girls had geography names; first came Asia, then Australia. When the last baby arrived, Billy had stood looking down at the small bundle and asked anxiously: "Are you goin' to have it fer a boy or a girl, ma?" Mrs. Wiggs had answered: "A girl, Billy, an' her name's Europena!" On this particular Sunday morning Mrs. Wiggs bustled about the kitchen in unusual haste. "I am goin' to make you all some nice Irish pertater soup fer dinner," she said, as she came in from the parlor, where she kept her potatoes and onions. "The boys'll be in soon, an' we'll have to hurry and git through 'fore the childern begin to come to Sunday-school." For many years Sunday afternoon had been a trying time in the neighborhood, so Mrs. Wiggs had organized a Sunday-school class at which she presided. "If there don't come Chris an' Pete a'ready!" said Asia, from her post by the stove; "I bet they've had their dinner, an' jes' come early to git some of ours!" "Why, Asia!" exclaimed Mrs. Wiggs, "that ain't hospit'le, an' Chris with one leg, too! 'T ain't no trouble at all. All I got to do is to put a little more water in the soup, an' me and Jim won't take but one piece of bread." When Jim and Billy came in they found their places at the table taken, so they sat on the floor and drank their soup out of tea-cups. "Gee!" said Billy, after the third help, "I've drinken so much that when I swallers a piece er bread I can hear it splash!"