m many blows, broken in body and
spirit, she told the girls who sat by her bed through the night such
fragments of her story as she could remember. It began, the part of it
that took account of Bleecker Street, when her husband was sent to
State's Prison for robbery, and, to live, she took up with a scoundrel
from whom she kept the secret of her child. With such of her earnings
as she could steal from her tormentor she had paid little Willie's
board until she was arrested and sent to the Island.

What had happened in the three days since she escaped from the
hospital, where she had been detailed with the scrubbing squad, she
recalled only vaguely and with long lapses. They had been days and
nights of wild carousing. She had come to herself at last, lying
beaten and bound in a room in the house where her child was killed, so
she said. A neighbor had heard her groans, released her, and given her
car fare to go down town. So she had come and sat in the doorway of
the Mission to die.

How much of this story was the imagining of a disordered mind, the
police never found out.

Upon her body were marks as of ropes that had made dark bruises, but
at the inquest they were said to be of blows. Toward morning, when the
girls had lain down to snatch a moment's sleep, she called one of
them, whom she had known before, and asked for a drink of water. As
she took it with feeble hand, she asked:--

"Lil', can you pray?"

For an answer the girl knelt by her bed and prayed. When she had
ended, Mamie Anderson fell asleep.

She was still sleeping when the others got up. They noticed after a
while that she lay very quiet and white, and one of them going to see,
found her dead.

That is the story of Mamie Anderson, as Bleecker Street told it to me.
Out on Long Island there is, in a suburban cemetery, a lovely shaded
spot where I sometimes sit by our child's grave. The green hillside
slopes gently under the chestnuts, violets and buttercups spring from
the sod, and the robin sings its jubilant note in the long June
twilights. Halfway down the slope, six or eight green mounds cluster
about a granite block in which are hewn the words:--

These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

It is the burial-plot of the Florence Mission. Under one of the
mounds lies all that was mortal of Mamie Anderson.

THE KID HANGS UP HIS STOCKING

The