Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy's face. He said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot and made one of the funniest little bows. "Thank you," he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with desperate entreaty: "Oh, mister! give _me_ a flower." Hot tears of grief and envy--human passions are much the same in rags and in silks--fell when they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe. And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the "posy" so eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough "hooked" at the grocer's. It was for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a drunken father, my lady's pinks blossomed, and, long after they were withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of something that had entered Tony's life and tenement with sweetening touch that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found, with all that belonged to him. Moved away--put out, probably--and, except the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the saloon could give me no clue to them.