Mary Ware's Promised Land

by Annie F. Johnston

"Don't you go to telling the landlord we complained," whined the woman with the baby. "He'd turn us out. Rents are so high everywhere that I tramped for days to find this place. The others was worse than this."

Mary's evident friendliness and warmly expressed interest soon started all three of the women to telling tales of Diamond Row. Mrs. Donegan's were the worst, as she claimed the distinction of being the oldest inhabitant. The one that aroused Mary's greatest indignation was of a child which had been drowned in the cellar ten years ago. The inside staircase going to the basement ran down over the cellar in some way, and it was so rotten in parts that it gave way one day and he fell through. It was in the spring, when the river was so high that the cellar was half full of backwater, and the child drowned before they could get him out.

Mrs. Donegan gave a dramatic account of it, omitting none of the gruesome details, for she had been fond of the pretty golden-haired boy of three, and sympathized with all the ardor of her warm Irish heart with the old grandmother, who was one of her best friends.

"That's sorrow for you," she exclaimed, shaking her head dismally. "If you could only see the poor old creature now, so crippled up with the misery in her bones that she can't leave her chair, and nothing for her to do all day but sit and eat her heart out with longing for little Terence. Ah, he was the fine lad, always hanging on his granny's chair and putting his little curly head on her shoulder to be petted. She keeps one of those curls always by her in a little box on the table, and like the sunshine it is. Come in and see it now. Do," she urged hospitably. "It's always glad she is to talk about him and cry over the sad end he come to."

Mary drew back, protesting that she couldn't bear to. It was all so horrible. "What did they do about it afterwards?" she asked.

"Nothing," was the answer. "The lad's father, Tim Reilly, was too poor to bring suit, and it cost something to move, and they couldn't get anything better for the same price. So they just stayed on, although his wife and the poor old granny almost wept their eyes out at the sight of that staircase for many a month. It was all written up in the papers, with pictures of Terence and the cellar. Lots of people came to look at the house, and there was a piece in the paper saying that the stairway was a death-trap, and that the owner ought to have the charge of murder laid at his door, and that an indignant public demanded that he put in a new one. Mrs. Reilly keeps one of these same papers by her to this day. She keeps it for the picture of Terence that's in it."

"How long was it before he put in the new stairway?" asked Mary, seeing that some response was expected of her.

The old woman leaned over and shook her finger impressively. "It's the gospel truth I'm telling you, never a one has been put in to this day. They just patched up the old one with a few new planks, and all rotten it is and tearing loose again, as you may see for yourself if you'll follow me."

But Mary refused this invitation also, and a little later took her leave, unutterably depressed by all that she had seen and heard. Mrs. Donegan, with the other women to refresh her memory, had counted up forty funerals which had taken place in Diamond Row in the eleven years that she had lived under its leaky roof.

Mary was through supper that night when Sandford Berry strolled in. "Well," he said, pausing to put his head in at the parlor door, where she sat glancing over the evening paper. "What luck?"