The dead-wagon stopped at the mouth of Cat Alley. Its coming made a
commotion among the children in the block, and the Chief of Police
looked out of his window across the street, his attention arrested by
the noise. He saw a little pine coffin carried into the alley under
the arm of the driver, a shoal of ragged children trailing behind.
After a while the driver carried it out again, shoved it in the wagon,
where there were other boxes like it, and, slamming the door, drove
off.

A red-eyed woman watched it down the street until it disappeared
around the corner. Then she wiped her eyes with her apron and went in.

It was only Mary Welsh's baby that was dead, but to her the alley,
never cheerful on the brightest of days, seemed hopelessly desolate
to-day. It was all she had. Her first baby died in teething.

Cat Alley is a back-yard illustration of the theory of evolution. The
fittest survive, and the Welsh babies were not among them. It would be
strange if they were. Mike, the father, works in a Crosby Street
factory when he does work. It is necessary to put it that way, for,
though he has not been discharged, he had only one day's work this
week and none at all last week. He gets one dollar a day, and the one
dollar he earned these last two weeks his wife had to draw to pay the
doctor with when the baby was so sick. They have had nothing else
coming in, and but for the wages of Mrs. Welsh's father, who lives
with them, there would have been nothing in the house to eat.

The baby came three weeks ago, right in the hardest of the hard times.
It was never strong enough to nurse, and the milk bought in Mulberry
Street is not for babies to grow on who are not strong enough to stand
anything. Little John never grew at all. He lay upon his pillow this
morning as white and wan and tiny as the day he came into a world that
didn't want him.

Yesterday, just before he died, he sat upon his grandmother's lap and
laughed and crowed for the first time in his brief life, "just like he
was talkin' to me," said the old woman, with a smile that struggled
hard to keep down a sob. "I suppose it was a sort of inward cramp,"
she added--a mother's explanation of baby laugh in Cat Alley.

The mother laid out the little body on the only table in their room,
in its only little white slip, and covered it with a piece of
discarded lace curtain to keep off the flies. They had no ice, and no
money to pay an undertaker for opening the lit