"No, it is only hard times," she answered. "Go again, and you will learn the whole story, unless you choose to hear it from me."
"No," I said as we stood under the shelter of the still unfinished Franklin Square Station on the elevated road, "I will hear it for myself if I can."
The time came sooner than I thought. A month later I went up the dark stairs, whose treacherous places I had learned to know, and found the room empty of all signs of occupation, though the bed and table still stood there.
"They're gone," a voice called from below. "They've come into luck, Pat says, but I don't know. Anyhow, they turned out o' here yesterday, an' left the things there for whoever 'd be wantin' 'em."
"Bad 'cess to the furriner!" said another voice as I passed down. "Comin' here wid his set-up ways, an' schornin' a bit of dhrink!"
"An' if ye'd take patthern of him yerself—" the woman's voice began, and was silenced by a push back into her room and the loud slam of the door.
"They have come to better times surely," the janitor said as I asked their whereabouts at the mission, "an' here's their new number. It's a quiet, decent place, an' he'll have a better soon."
After Cherry and Roosevelt and Water streets, Madison street seems another Fifth Avenue. The old New Yorker knows it as the once stately and decorous abode of old Dutch families, a few of whom still cling to the ancient homes, but most of these are now cheap boarding-Pouses and tenements, while here and there a new genuine tenement-house is sandwiched between the tiled roofs and dormer-windows which still hold suggestions of former better days. The more respectable class of 'longshoremen find quarters here, and some of the mission-people, who, well-to-do enough to seek quieter homes, choose to be as near as possible to the work waiting for them, and for more like them, in that nest of evil and outrage and slime, the Fourth Ward.
Brita's head was bowed on the table as I went in, and Jan's face was sorrowful as he looked toward her. "It iss not so alvay," he said. "She hass made it all so good, and now she dinks of Brita, dat vill not see it, and she say still, 'God iss hard to take her avay.'"
"How is it, Jan? Did work come all at once?"