The trampling, staring inmates of the tenement crowded the stairs, a stench of cabbage and of gas possessed the place. The carpenter’s wife, a string around her shapeless middle, and looking as though she might add to her progeny at any minute, came to the door of her two-room kennel. "Poor little Stephanie," she said, "you come right in and make you’self at home along of us!" And, as the child did not stir, seemingly frozen there against the stained and battered wall, the carpenter said: "_Du_! Stephanie! Hey you, Steve! Come home und get you some breakfast right away quick!" "Is that their kid?" inquired a policeman coming out of the place of death and wiping the sweat from his face. "Sure. I take her in." "Well, you’ll have to fix that matter later——" "I fix it now. I take dot little Steve for mine——" The policeman yawned over the note book in which he was writing. "It ain’t done that way, I’m tellin’ you! Well, all _right_! You can keep her until the thing is fixed up——" He went on writing. The carpenter strode over to the child; his blond hair bristled, his beard was fearsome and like an ogre’s. But his voice trembled with Teuton sentiment. "You got a new mamma, Steve!" he rumbled. "Now, you run in und cry mit her so much as you like." He pulled the little girl gently toward his rooms; the morbid crowd murmured on the stairs at the sight of the child of suicides. "Mamma, here iss our little Steve alretty!" growled Schmidt. "Now, py Gott! I got to go to my job! A hellofa business iss it! Schade—immer—schade! Another mouth to feed, py Gott!" *FOREWORD* On the Christmas-tide train which carried homeward those Saint James schoolboys who resided in or near New York, Cleland Junior sat chattering with his comrades in a drawing-room car entirely devoted to the Saint James boys, and resounding with the racket of their interminable gossip and laughter. The last number of their school paper had come out on the morning of their departure for Christmas holidays at home; every boy had a copy and was trying to read it aloud to his neighbour; shrieks of mirth resounded, high, shrill arguments, hot disputes, shouts of approval or of protest. "Read this! Say, did you get this!" cried a tall boy named Grismer. "Jim Cleland wrote it! What do you know about our own pet novelist——" "_Shut_ up!" retorted Cleland Junior, blushing and abashed by accusation of authorship. "He wrote it all right!" repeated Grismer exultantly. "Oh, girls! Just listen to this mush about the birds and the bees and the bright blue sky——" "Jim, you’re all right! That’s the stuff!" shouted another. "The girl in the story’s a peach, and the battle scene is great!" "Say, Jim, where do you get your battle stuff?" inquired another lad respectfully. "Out of the papers, of course," replied Cleland Junior. "All you have to do is to read ’em, and you can think out the way it really looks."