n meal for
provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard
houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with
black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open.
The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment
was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard
clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and
the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through
one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all
creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with
her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside
the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken,
and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with
such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership
then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the
conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of
any sort of biped, and said:

"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"

And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing
dutifully, "Yes, m'm."

The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across
the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section,
afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who
looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy
than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into
hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where
Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous
stare quite under passing rank.

It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome
tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now
pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My
delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder.
Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had
already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed,
moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she
had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she
was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.

She had carefully seen to it, all the journey through, that he had
oxygen enough. The March wind blew so harshly that