"The court,
Where he was better off than all the other young boys,
With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster shells, and a dead kitten by way of toys."
They mounted a ricketty staircase grimed with dirt. Smells of new degrees and varieties of loathsomeness assaulted them at every landing. The Italian rag-pickers in the basement were sorting their filthy wares, while a little girl was concocting for them the garlic stew over a charcoal brazier. The mingled fumes came thick from the open door. Mrs. Grogan on the first floor had paused in her washing to take a pull at a villainous pipe. She came to the door still smoking, and carrying in her arms an almost skeleton baby, who sucked at a dirty rag containing a crust dipped in gin. Winnie obtained one glimpse of the interior of Mrs. Grogan's domicile, and drew back quite pale. "Adelaide," she said, "the room literally swarmed with babies; that woman cannot have so many all of the same age." Inquiry of Mrs. Halsey enlightened them. Mrs. Grogan was a "baby-farmer," and boarded these children, making a good income thereby, as their mothers were servants in good families. On the next floor a family of eight were working in a hall-bedroom, at rolling cigars. The large rooms were occupied by some Chinese. Mrs. Halsey thought that they used them as an opium den. Past more doors, up three more pairs of stairs, and they paused at No. 1. They knocked several times, but they could not make themselves heard above the buzz and whirr of a sewing-machine. Finally Winnie opened the door, and there sat Mrs. Halsey bent over the machine, while the floor was piled with dainty underclothing neatly tucked.
She sprang up, evidently pleased to see Winnie again, and motioned her callers to the only seats which the room afforded—a chair, a trunk, and a stool.
Winnie apologized for the interruption, and explained her errand. "But perhaps you are too busy to design this dress," Adelaide said; "I see you have plenty of work."
"It will not take long to make a little sketch," Mrs. Halsey replied, "and it will be a real pleasure for me to do it." As her fingers moved rapidly over the paper the girls took an inventory of the room. A cracked cooking-stove, and a cupboard behind it formed of a dry-goods box, but all the utensils were scrupulously clean. A closet, another dry-goods case on end, with a chintz curtain in front, concealed, as Winnie's prying eyes ascertained, a roll of bedding, which was evidently spread on the floor at night. Mrs. Halsey knelt before a worn table, and this, with the sewing-machine, completed the furnishing of the apartment. No, in the window there was a row of fruit-cans containing some geraniums. Miss Sartoris discovered them, and Mrs. Halsey apologized for their condition. "They were just in bud," she said, "but we were without coal for several days, and they were nipped by frost."
Poor woman! she looked as if she had been nipped by the frost too during that bitter experience. She coughed, and Adelaide remarked, "You ought to drink cream, Mrs. Halsey; they say it is better for a cough than cod-liver oil."
"I have plenty of milk," the little woman replied. "The milkman for whom my Jim works lets him have the milk that he finds left over in the cans when he washes them out after his rounds. Sometimes there's as much as a pint, and almost always enough for our oatmeal."
Mrs. Halsey spoke cheerily and proudly—as of a luxury which she owed her boy. The design was completed, and Adelaide was delighted.
"Would you like to have me make the costume in tissue-paper?" Mrs. Halsey asked; "the sleeve, at least, and this drapery; then any seamstress can make it."