"Why, you see," she said between her sobs, "me and Johnny made our livin' a-sellin' pop-corn; and last night we had a bushel popped ready for the Monday's trade; and now it's all gone: we've lost everything—all that beautiful corn: there wasn't a single scorched grain."
"But think what others have lost—their beautiful homes and all their business—"
She suddenly ceased crying, and, turning upon him, said sharply, "We lost all we had: did they lose any more'n they had?"
A young man came pressing through the crowd, desperately clutching a picture in a handsome gilt frame. Through the smoke and smutch which stained the canvas was seen a gray-haired, saintly woman's head.
"The picture of his mother," thought the doctor with a swelling about his heart.
"I saved dese," said a jolly-faced German, extending his two hands; "and dey is all I had when I come from de Faderland to Chicago. And saved you nothin'?"
The man appealed to had about him three children and a pale delicate woman.
"I saved these," he said with a gesture that was an embrace. "All the baby-faces we left hanging on the walls in the home where all were born."
Then the bearded lip quivered and the lids were dropped over the brimming eyes. The mother looked up with clear, unfaltering features, and with a light grateful, almost joyous, in her fine eyes, and said softly, "But all the real faces we've brought along."
Then one of the little girls took up the story: "Oh, mother, Tommy's picture will be burned, and we can never get another. Tommy's dead, you know," she explained.