y into the air, as though oblivious
of everything around him. "'Though I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou
art there,'" he said in slow measured soliloquy. His lip began to quiver
and the tears to stream down his furrowed face. Dr. Lively heard, and
wiped his eyes on the back of his hand: he had nothing else to receive
the quick tears. Just then a hearse with nodding black plumes came by
loaded with boxes and bundles, on which were perched a woman and five
children, the three youngest crowing and laughing in unconscious glee at
their strange circumstances. This was followed by two buggies hitched
together, both packed with women and children drawn by a single horse,
astride of which was a lame man.

"What is it, madam?" said Dr. Lively to a woman who was wringing her
hands and crying piteously.

"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.

The mother's eyes grew misty, and so did the German's and the doctor's,