“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and little then. “The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition.” Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power, might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian people round about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one. Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter, also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.