Here is one of the little girls who got my dolls (see illustration facing page 98), little Susie Rocco, whose story I promised to tell you. Susie was as good a girl as you can find in Philadelphia, search where you may. Perhaps she was not very well instructed in the higher ethics of things. It may be that Mrs. Carrie Nation would not have approved of her, because the work she did and by which she helped her mother run the household was pasting covers on pocket-flasks, whiskey flasks, which, I suppose, come under the ban entirely. Susie did not, I know. She was not concerned about that; she was concerned about helping her mother, and, though I am no champion of the whiskey flask, I stand with Susie. Her father was a loafer and when he ran away at last and the mother fell ill and Susie’s work gave out, the evil days came that are never far away in a slum alley. Everything went to the pawnshop, last of all the mother’s wedding ring. I should have sent that first, but she was a woman; I am a man. She had to go to the hospital then; the doctor said so. It was the only place where she could be properly cared for. Susie wept. She was afraid of the hospital. You know it, all of you who have had any dealings with the poor, that one of their very real hardships is that, when most they need that friend, they are afraid of him. Susie could not bear the thought. She cast about in the house for something that was yet of value enough to take to the pawnshop, so that she might stay the evil day, and she found my doll. It was not a nice doll by that time; it was very much in need of the hospital itself. But to Susie it was precious beyond compare, for was it not her doll baby? She did it up in a newspaper and carried it to the pawnshop with tears, for she was bringing the greatest sacrifice of all. And that bad man, when he unrolled the bundle and saw what it held, smashed the doll angrily against the stove and put little Susie out into the street. There she stood and wept, as if she would cry her eyes out, and there one of the King’s Daughters found her; and that was how I came to know Susie and her story. Better days came for her and her mother, for the ladies took them up and cared for them. They were made happy and I ought to have been, but I was not. Let me confess it right here and have done with it. I am no scrapper; I have too much else to do to go around picking quarrels with everybody. I try hard to do as the Apostle says: “live peaceably with all men as far as in me lies”; but how can it lie very far in anybody with that kind of a pawnbroker in the landscape? I own that the notion of having one little round with that man, just one little one, has charms that I cannot get around. [Illustration: IN A BAXTER STREET YARD] [Illustration: SHANTY DWELLINGS IN A TENEMENT YARD From “The Battle with the Slum.” Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]