With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to be the best. “What are you going to do with these scraps?” I asked of the older child. Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened. She clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little body. “Don’t you touch it!” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes searched the street in hope of succor. [Illustration: “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.] It was easy to reassure her, and then she spoke freely. “Ma sent us to get some grub for supper,” she explained. “Ma’s got three boarders, only two of ’em ain’t paid nothing for a month, and pa, he’s drunk. He ain’t got no job, but he went out to shovel snow to-day, and ma thought he’d bring her some money, but he came home drunk. She’s mindin’ the baby, and she sent us for grub. She’d lick us if we didn’t find none; but I guess she won’t lick us now, will she? That’s where we live,” and one little chapped finger pointed down the alley to the crumbling hovel in the dark. The children were ready to go home, and I lifted the younger girl into my arms. Her sister walked beside us with the basket in her hand. The little one lay soft and warm against me. After the first moment of surprise, she had relaxed with the gentle yielding of a little child, and I could feel her nestle close to me with the trustful ease which thrills one’s inmost heart with feeling for which there are no words. We opened the shanty door. It was difficult at first to make out the room’s interior. Dense banks of tobacco-smoke drifted lazily through foul air in the cheerful light of a small oil-lamp. Shreds of old wall-paper hung from dark, greasy plaster, which was crumbling from the walls and ceiling and which lay in accumulations of lime-dust upon a rotting wooden floor. A baby of pallid, putty flesh was crying fretfully in the arms of a haggard, slatternly woman of less than thirty years, who sat in a broken chair, rocking the baby in her arms beside a dirty wooden table, on which were strewn fragments of broken pottery and unwashed forks and spoons and knives. A rough workman, stripped to his shirt and trousers, sat smoking a clay pipe, his bare feet resting in the oven of a rusty cooking-stove in which a fire was smouldering. Upon a heap of rags in one corner lay a drunken man asleep. “We’ve got some grub, ma!” cried the older child, in a tone of success, as she ran up to her mother with the basket. “Riley’s barrel was full to-night.” [Illustration: “WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.”]