For an answer the girl knelt by her bed and prayed. When she had ended, Mamie Anderson fell asleep.
She was still sleeping when the others got up. They noticed after a while that she lay very quiet and white, and one of them going to see, found her dead.
That is the story of Mamie Anderson, as Bleecker Street told it to me. Out on Long Island there is, in a suburban cemetery, a lovely shaded spot where I sometimes sit by our child's grave. The green hillside slopes gently under the chestnuts, violets and buttercups spring from the sod, and the robin sings its jubilant note in the long June twilights. Halfway down the slope, six or eight green mounds cluster about a granite block in which are hewn the words:—
These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
It is the burial-plot of the Florence Mission. Under one of the mounds lies all that was mortal of Mamie Anderson.
THE KID HANGS UP HIS STOCKING
The clock in the West Side Boys' Lodging-house ticked out the seconds of Christmas eve as slowly and methodically as if six fat turkeys were not sizzling in the basement kitchen against the morrow's spread, and as if two-score boys were not racking their brains to guess what kind of pies would go with them. Out on the avenue the shopkeepers were barring doors and windows, and shouting "Merry Christmas!" to one another across the street as they hurried to get home. The drays ran over the pavement with muffled sounds; winter had set in with a heavy snow-storm. In the big hall the monotonous click of checkers on the board kept step with the clock. The smothered exclamations of the boys at some unexpected, bold stroke, and the scratching of a little fellow's pencil on a slate, trying to figure out how long it was yet till the big dinner, were the only sounds that broke the quiet of the room. The superintendent dozed behind his desk.
A door at the end of the hall creaked, and a head with a shock of weather-beaten hair was stuck cautiously through the opening.
"Tom!" it said in a stage-whisper. "Hi, Tom! Come up an' git on ter de lay of de Kid."
A bigger boy in a jumper, who had been lounging on two chairs by the group of checker players, sat up and looked toward the door. Something in the energetic toss of the head there aroused his instant curiosity, and he started across the room. After a brief whispered conference the door closed upon the two, and silence fell once more on the hall.