their cribs, strapped, because their backs were crooked, in the frames
that look so cruel and are so kind, lifted up their feeble voices as they
watched the show with shining eyes. Little baby Helen, who could only
smile and wave "by-by" with one fat hand, piped in with her tiny voice,
"Here I is!" It was all she knew, and she gave that with a right good
will, which is as much as one can ask of anybody, even of a snow baby.

If there were still lacking a last link to rivet Gimpy's loyalty to his
new home for good and all, he himself supplied it when the band gathered
under the leafless trees--for Sea Breeze has a grove in summer, the only
one on the island--and whiled away the afternoon making a "park" in the
snow, with sea-shells for curbing and boundary stones. When it was all
but completed, Gimpy, with an inspiration that then and there installed
him leader, gave it the finishing touch by drawing a policeman on the
corner with a club, and a sign, "Keep off the grass." Together they gave
it the air of reality and the true local color that made them feel, one
and all, that now indeed they were at home.

Toward evening a snow-storm blew in from the sea, but instead of scurrying
for shelter, the little Eskimos joined the doctor in hauling wood for a
big bonfire on the beach. There, while the surf beat upon the shore hardly
a dozen steps away, and the storm whirled the snow-clouds in weird drifts
over sea and land, they drew near the fire, and heard the doctor tell
stories that seemed to come right out of the darkness and grow real while
they listened. Dr. Wallace is a Southerner and lived his childhood with
Br'er Rabbit and Mr. Fox, and they saw them plainly gamboling in the
firelight as the story went on. For the doctor knows boys and loves them,
that is how.

No one would have guessed that they were cripples, every one of that
rugged band that sat down around the Christmas supper-table, rosy-cheeked
and jolly--cripples condemned, but for Sea Breeze, to lives of misery and
pain, most of them to an early death and suffering to others. For their
enemy was that foe of mankind, the White Plague, that for thousands of
years has taken tithe and toll of the ignorance and greed and selfishness
of man, which sometimes we call with one name--the slum. Gimpy never
would have dreamed that the tenement held no worse threat for the baby he
yearned for than himself, with his crippled foot, when he was there. These
things you could