"You're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't been long in Chicago. I just thought I'd tell you about a girl who was workin' here in the General Electric factory. She was sixteen—a real nice-lookin' girl from the South. She left her mother and come up here alone. It wasn't long before she got to foolin' round with one of the young men over to the factory. They were both young; they didn't mean no harm; but one day she come an' told me, cryin' like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her young man had slipped off up to Michigan."
Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested, and as I responded with a heartfelt "Oh, my!" she went on:
"Well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin', her loneliness for her mother. I'd come in her room sometimes at midnight—the very room you have now—and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart out. I want to tell you never to get discouraged. Just you listen to what happened. The gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn't by kindness. Well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin' to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the weddin' without tellin' her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin' right there," she pointed to the
rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when he come in. He was carryin' a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long white ribbons. He offered 'em to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor at him. After awhile they went together into her room and talked for half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. He was real kind. He kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin' me for takin' care of her. They were married, and when the weddin' was over she didn't want to stay with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up between them."
She had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird and his cage. She put them on the table and prepared to give the bird his bath and fresh seed.
"You see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's what good employers will do for you. If you're working in a good place they'll do right by you, and it don't pay to get down-hearted."
I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story. Evidently I must account for my Sundays! It was with the bird now that Mrs. Brown continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van Winkle in plumage. His claws trailed over the sand of the cage. Except when Mrs. Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing in her part of the tenement.
"
I've had him twenty-five years," she said to me. "Brown give him to me. I guess I'd miss him if he died." And presently she repeated again: "I don't believe I even know how much I'd miss him."
On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew must be open, as I felt a cold wind. The lake brought capricious changes of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the newcomer might be. The sight of him set my heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was questioning the man to find out who he was.... He was evidently nobody—a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into debris upon the edge of a city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for himself; the type par excellence who has worn out charity organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there were none of it left in the world. He was asking for food. The proprietor gave him the