"It's not a superstition, it's only a custom," De Ruyter explained; "and whether it's a transplanted survival or not I can't say. You see I've never seen the thing myself, but I've been told about it. I hear that down in the tenement-house region, when a family can't pay the rent and the landlord puts their scant furniture out on the sidewalk, and they don't know where to lay their heads that night, then one of the neighbors takes a candle and lights it and sticks it up on a plate, and takes his stand on the sidewalk; and this is a sign to everybody that there is a family in sore distress, and so the passers-by drop in a penny or two until there is enough to pay the arrears of rent and let the poor mother and children go back." Mrs. Jimmy Suydam laughed a little bitterly. "That sort of thing may be possible on Cherry Hill," she said, "but it would never do on Murray Hill, would it? Just imagine how absurd a broken millionaire would look standing at a street corner with a little electric light on a silver salver, expecting the multi-millionaires going by to drop in a check or two to pay his rent for him!" "I thought I had a quaint little silhouette of metropolitan life for you," De Ruyter responded, smiling back; "but you spoil the picture if you guy it like that." "Very curious it is," said Barry--"very curious, indeed. 'How far a little candle throws its beams.' I don't think that the custom was exported from Ireland or from England--at least, I do not recall anything analogous." "I've heard an old Irishwoman complain that the law was harder here on the tenant than it was in the old country," Miss Peters asserted; and then she appended an imitation of the old Irishwoman's speech: "'Sure, they'd boycott the landlord there, that's what they'd do, or they'd shoot the agent, maybe; but here ye can't--there's the police, bad cess to 'em!'" "Have you ever seen the candle in the plate?" Barry asked her, across the table. "Never," she answered. "But you have heard of it?" De Ruyter inquired. "Never before to-night," was her reply. "You don't mean to say you don't believe that there is any such custom?" Mrs. Jimmy asked. "Thus all our illusions are shattered one by one." "Of course, I don't know," the girl responded; "I haven't been working down there very long--only since last February. But it sounds like it was a fake, as we used to say in the newspaper office when I was a reporter." Mrs. Jimmy Suydam had never met Miss Peters before, and now she examined the girl curiously, wondering what sort of being a woman was who had been a reporter and was now living among the poor, and who happened also to be dining at Mrs. Canton's. The hostess was just then explaining to Mr. Suydam in a whisper that Miss Peters was a Southern girl of excellent family, who used to write those "Polly Perkins" articles for the _Dial_ on Sunday, but who had given it up last winter, and now acted as her secretary.