"Set down." Mrs. Gibbons, the baby still in her arms, made effort to dust one of the two chairs in the room with the gingham apron she was wearing, and, after failing, motioned me to take it. The other one she pushed toward Bettina with her foot. On the bed was a little girl of six or seven, and as we took our seats a boy, who barely looked ten, came from behind a couple of wash-tubs in an opposite corner of the room and wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a hook in the wall. To ask something concerning this boy was the purpose of our visit. "Speak to the lady, Jimmy. Anybody would think you didn't have no manners! No, you can't have your supper yet." Mrs. Gibbons waved her hand weakly at her son, who, smiling at us, had gone to a corner cupboard with perforated tins of diamond pattern in its doors, and taken therefrom a soup-plate and cup and saucer. Paying no attention to his mother's reference to a delayed meal, he ladled out of the big saucepan, with a cracked cup, a plate of the steaming soup, and carried it carefully to an oilcloth-covered table, on which was a lamp and glass pitcher, some unwashed dishes left from the last meal, a broken doll, and a child's shoe. Putting down the plate of soup, he came back to the stove and poured out a cup of feeble-looking coffee. "Goin' to be extras out to-night and I mightn't get back till after ten." Again his gay little smile lighted his thin face. "Ifen I don't eat now I mightn't eat at all. Have one?" He poked a plate of the health-destroying biscuits at Bettina with a merry little movement, and bravely she took one, bravely made effort to eat it. "What's your name?" I heard him ask her, and then I turned to Mrs. Gibbons. "It is about your little boy I've come to see you." I moved my chair as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat. "He is too young to be at work. He isn't twelve, is he?" The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy's bondage to a bench from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing. With helplessness and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an excellent example of both. Still--"He isn't twelve yet, is he?" I repeated. Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the other. For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.