nrolled Cornelia was added to the
gathering. Her red and yellow kimona rose and fell with her quick
breathing. Defiance shone in her black eyes.

"You got mine baby," declared Rosie Rashnowsky. "Why couldn't you leave
her be where I put her, you old Miss Fix-its? You scared me most to
death until I heard her yellin'."

With these ungrateful remarks she advanced upon the ministering group
and snatched the inverted infant from the colic theorist.

"This is the top of her," she pointed out. "I guess you didn't look very
hard."

Before the discredited practitioner had formed a reply the Cornelia in
spectacles was ready to remark:

"We think your baby is hungry."

"Sure is she," Rosie concurred; "ain't babies always hungry?"

"And if you will tell us what you feed her on," the lady continued, "we
will send out for some of it before you take her home."

Rosie was by this time established in a chair with the now only
whimpering baby upon her lap.

"Don't you bother," she genially remonstrated. "I just bought her
something."

And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of
her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper.
She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it
into the baby's waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were
supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. "Pickles!" they
cried, and shuddered. "Do you often give that baby pickles?"

"I do when I can get 'em," Rosie answered, "but that ain't often."

And then this injudicious but warm-hearted audience drew from her the
sordid little story which seemed such a matter of course to her, and
such a tragedy to them.

"Und I looks," said Rosie, "all times I looks on cellars und push-carts
und fire 'scapes und stores und sidewalks. Und I walks und I walks--all
times I walks--mit that baby in mine hand, und I couldn't to find me the
papa. Mine poor mamma, she looks too, sooner she goes und comes on the
factory, und by night me und mine mamma, we comes by our house und we
looks on ourselves und we don't says nothings, on'y makes so"--and Rosie
shook a hopeless head--"und so we knows we ain't find him. Sometimes
mine mamma cries over it. She is got all times awful sad looks."

By this time the more sentimental among the Cornelias were reduced to
tears, and the more practical were surveying such finances as they
carried with them, and in a very short time an endowment fund o