s. Pringle
had worn hers. I touched the nearest bundle on the shoulder. She awoke
with a start, and peered around at me with a pitiful whimper. I
explained that I only wanted to pass, and that she would oblige me very
much to allow me to do so.

"You want to git out, do ye, dearie? Well, you jist shall git out," came
the rejoinder in a high, quavering voice, and slowly the old woman
lifted herself, with many groans and "ouches" for her stiffened joints.

"Dearie! dearie! I thought ye wuz the cop," the old crone went on, as
she grasped my arm in a hand whose thinness I could feel through my thin
jacket. "A nice arm it is ye have got, and yit ye don't speak as if ye
be one of we uns, be you?" The withered hand held me as though in a
vise, while I could feel the gin-laden breath of the unfortunate
creature as she peered close into my face.

"Please--please let me go!" I whispered, for I could hear the stumbling
footsteps within near the bottom of the stairs. "Please let me go! I
must go to the drug-store to find a doctor; some one is sick."

"Sure, dearie, sure!" and the thin fingers relaxed their hold. "Do ye
know where the drug-store is? and mightn't I make bold enough to ask to
go with ye? It's late for a lady to be out, with the streets full of
drunks and lazy longshoremen; and I know you _be_ a lady."

I was in a quandary. Naturally I did not want to accept this drunken
woman's offer to pilot me, and yet I really had not the heart to offend
the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice
at the mention of sickness. She seemed to take my silence for
acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the
dark street. At the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each
other distinctly for the first time. She was dark and swarthy, with
deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, I
noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. She was
about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy,
stooped shoulders. Evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory
of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all
manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city,
with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw
one, and that if I wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name
wasn't Mrs. Bridget Reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married
woman and the mot