ng to barricade the door, when they recognized Rose's voice
and were calmed. Let in, the expedition explained matters, and was
grudgingly allowed to take a look out of the window in the air-shaft.
Yes! there was the meat, as yet safe from rats. The thing was to get
it.

The boarder tried first, but crawled back frightened. He couldn't
reach it. Rose jerked him impatiently away.

"Leg go!" she said. "I can do it. I was there wunst. You're no good."

And she bent over the window-sill, reaching down until her toes barely
touched the floor, when all of a sudden, before they could grab her
skirts, over she went, heels over head, down the shaft, and
disappeared.

The shrieks of the Knauffs, of Mrs. Baruch, and of Jake, the boarder,
were echoed from below. Rose's voice rose in pain and in bitter
lamentation from the bottom of the shaft. She had fallen fully fifteen
feet, and in the fall had hurt her back badly, if, indeed, she had not
injured herself beyond repair. Her cries suggested nothing less. They
filled the tenement, rising to every floor and appealing at every
bedroom window.

In a minute the whole building was astir from cellar to roof. A dozen
heads were thrust out of every window, and answering wails carried
messages of helpless sympathy to the once so unpopular Rose. Upon this
concert of sorrow the police broke in with anxious inquiry as to what
was the matter.

When they found out, a second relief expedition was organized. It
reached Rose through the basement coal-bin, and she was carried out
and sent to the Gouverneur Hospital. There she lies, unable to move,
and the tenement wonders what is amiss that it has lost its old
spirits. It has not even anything left to swear at.

The cat took the kosher meat.

NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS

It was Christmas Eve over on the East Side. Darkness was closing in on
a cold, hard day. The light that struggled through the frozen windows
of the delicatessen store and the saloon on the corner, fell upon men
with empty dinner-pails who were hurrying homeward, their coats
buttoned tightly, and heads bent against the steady blast from the
river, as if they were butting their way down the street.

The wind had forced the door of the saloon ajar, and was whistling
through the crack; but in there it seemed to make no one afraid.
Between roars of laughter, the clink of glasses and the rattle of dice
on the hardwood counter were heard out in the street. More than one of
the pa