Both of these children were noticeably good-looking, and the day I met them carefully and comfortably dressed. It was in a tenement-house in which the janitor lived on the top floor. Being a bit out of breath after climbing five flights of steep stairs, I halted in the passageway before knocking at the door of the janitor’s flat.
As I stood there the door leading to the roof opened, and two girls entered, each with a bundle wrapped in a sheet. The house was profoundly quiet, and they were more than half-way down the stairs before they saw me.
“Our mother sent us to carry home this wash,” one of them said to me, and she indicated the bundles.
“What were you doing on the roof?” I asked, more puzzled by her explanation than I had been by their appearance.
“We live on the top floor,” she replied, and without the slightest hesitation. “It’s easier than going down so many stairs.”
“H’m!” the older girl sniffed. “Who likes to carry bundles like these through the street? Folks laugh at us.”
Stepping aside I let them pass. Then as I watched them make that flight I called down to them:
“Tell your mother next time not to make your bundles so heavy. Let you make two turns. Neither of you are strong enough for that load.”
The janitor proved to be an old acquaintance—this being my third or fourth call on the dogs in her house. She was a gossipy Italian woman, and since she last saw me many things of importance to her had happened. She insisted on my coming in and sitting down.
After inspecting her new baby and admiring the photograph of her brother in an Italian uniform, among other subjects I chanced to mention was the hope that she would not allow her little girls to tote huge bundles of wash across roofs. I then told of the two children who had passed me in the hall.