THE STREET SINGER
A VIENNESE STORY
I.
Winter, hard and merciless as a tax collector, stalked threateningly before the dilapidated doors of Vienna's poor.
Back of the white Tanneries, not far from the magnificently built Franz Josef's bridge, where misery and dire poverty had made their dreary home for many decades, winter seemed harder and colder than elsewhere; for with the poor wretched creatures who dwell near these Tanneries, there is—as everybody knows—but little sympathy.
A sweet-looking girl, hardly fourteen years of age, came shivering with bent head, out of one of the poorest and dirtiest homesteads of the poverty-stricken district.
Her thin, threadbare gingham dress, torn in many places, exposed here and there the trembling little form beneath. Over it she wore an old, shabby-looking plaid shawl—apparently her mother's—which blown back now and again by the unceremonious wind, exposed to view an old violin. She held it as tight as if it were the only earthly treasure she possessed. A ribbon, that had once been blue, held up her knotted hair, and gave her the appearance of a gipsy. And as for her shoes, it would seem that only the upper part had preserved a right to the name; for her stiff-frozen little toes were almost on the ground.
She walked on and on, greatly oppressed, giving no heed to the cruel wind that played havoc with her fluttering curls. Her large black eyes, which held a singular fascination in their sparkling depths, were now filled with burning tears.
She was barely on the threshold of girlhood, but life in its unfathomable savagery, had already thrown its challenging gauntlet in her frightened, childish face. She felt instinctively that poor little outcast as she was, she must not shrink from battle, but struggle on as best she could either with cruel wind and weather or with bitter cold and want.
She had struggled bravely, never minding how fruitless her little efforts seemed. But the one thing to which she had never accustomed herself, and which made a storm of tears rain down her pale face, was the frightful apparition of the hollow-eyed skeleton, hunger—that hunger which now held sway over her sick mother's house.