tle grave in Calvary,
where their first baby lay. All night she sat by the improvised bier,
her tears dropping silently.

When morning came and brought the woman with the broken arm from
across the hall to sit by her, it was sadly evident that the burial of
the child must be hastened. It was not well to look at the little face
and the crossed baby hands, and even the mother saw it.

"Let the trench take him, in God's name; He has his soul," said the
grandmother, crossing herself devoutly.

An undertaker had promised to put the baby in the grave in Calvary for
twelve dollars and take two dollars a week until it was paid. But how
can a man raise two dollars a week, with only one coming in in two
weeks, and that gone to the doctor? With a sigh Mike Welsh went for
the "lines" that must smooth its way to the trench in the Potter's
Field, and then to Mr. Blake's for the dead-wagon. It was the hardest
walk of his life.

And so it happened that the dead-wagon halted at Cat Alley and that
little John took his first and last ride. A little cross and a number
on the pine box, cut in the lid with a chisel, and his brief history
was closed, with only the memory of the little life remaining to the
Welshes to help them fight the battle alone.

In the middle of the night, when the dead-lamp burned dimly at the
bottom of the alley, a policeman brought to Police Headquarters a
wailing child, an outcast found in the area of a Lexington Avenue
house by a citizen, who handed it over to the police. Until its cries
were smothered in the police nursery upstairs with the ever ready
bottle, they reached the bereaved mother in Cat Alley and made her
tears drop faster. As the dead-wagon drove away with its load in the
morning, Matron Travers came out with the now sleeping waif in her
arms. She, too, was bound for Mr. Blake's.

The two took their ride on the same boat--the living child, whom no
one wanted, to Randall's Island, to be enlisted with its number in the
army of the city's waifs, strong and able to fight its way; the dead,
for whom a mother's heart yearns, to its place in the great ditch.

A PROPOSAL ON THE ELEVATED

The sleeper on the 3.35 A.M. elevated train from the Harlem bridge was
awake for once. The sleeper is the last car in the train, and has its
own set that snores nightly in the same seats, grunts with the fixed
inhospitality of the commuter at the intrusion of a stranger, and is
on terms with Conrad, the Germ