Ned's mother returned no comment, no reply, to these suggestions; sometimes it seemed as if she had some impediment in her speech, so silent she had become, so taciturn with her neighbors. The fact that she was country-bred was shown abundantly in her stolid uncommunicativeness, her vague terror of all the ways of the great city outside of these four walls, her old-fashioned code of manners and morals, and the painfully wrought and maintained cleanliness of her surroundings. No slight task it was, to be sure, to "pack" the water which plentifully drenched floors, tables, pots, kettles, windows, up four flights of steep stairs from the hydrant in the yard! Small wonder that poverty and dirt are so often concomitant. It had been an evil day for her and her simple, untutored husband when some vague, distorted ambition had moved him to despise the small havings of a country-side blacksmith and seek to become a "horse-shoer" among the often mythical advantages of a large town. He had little of the canny thrift characteristic of his Scotch nationality. He was an open-handed, jovial, florid, red-haired, fiery-tempered man,--over sanguine and credulous. The many deceptions practiced upon greenhorns, the greater expense of living, the fierce competition of an already crowded trade, baffled and bewildered the sturdy fellow. He worked as long as he had work, but when he was idle he began to drink more and more, and perhaps at last it was no great misfortune to his family when one of the pestilences which decimate the tenement region laid this once fair stalk of wheat low with the "cheat." He left his wife, Ned, and the puny, sickly little girl as remote, as alien from their old, country home, as if that haven of humble, hearty comfort were in a foreign planet. They lived as best they might on the boy's wages and the few jobs of coarse washing that she could get to do at home. It was the pride of both mother and son that they had maintained this precarious existence on these slender means now for more than a year, and in this fact they saw a glad augury for the future. Her face always wore, however, an apprehensive, appealing expression, although Ned remembered when it had been otherwise. As she turned it toward him now all her perseverance, her self-sacrifice, her deprivations, her honest, persistent uprightness, her mingled fears and faith in some fair future for him touched his heart with a potent force. He cast but one glance at her and burst instantly into tears.