nd all alike had failed.

During the long search, I had occasion to go more than once to the
Lubinskys' home. They lived up three flights, in one of the big
barracks that give to the lower end of Essex Street the appearance of
a deep black canon with cliff-dwellers living in tiers all the way up,
their watch-fires showing like so many dull red eyes through the
night. The hall was pitch-dark, and the whole building redolent of the
slum; but in the stuffy little room where the pedler lived there was,
in spite of it all, an atmosphere of home that set it sharply apart
from the rest. One of these visits I will always remember. I had
stumbled in, unthinking, upon their Sabbath-eve meal. The candles were
lighted, and the children gathered about the table; at its head, the
father, every trace of the timid, shrinking pedler of Mulberry Street
laid aside with the week's toil, was invoking the Sabbath blessing
upon his house and all it harbored. I saw him turn, with a quiver of
the lip, to a vacant seat between him and the mother, and it was then
that I noticed the baby's high chair, empty, but kept ever waiting
for the little wanderer. I understood; and in the strength of domestic
affection that burned with unquenched faith in the dark tenement after
the many months of weary failure I read the history of this strange
people that in every land and in every day has conquered even the slum
with the hope of home.

It was not to be put to shame here, either. Yette returned, after all,
and the way of it came near being stranger than all the rest. Two long
years had passed, and the memory of her and hers had long since faded
out of Mulberry Street, when, in the overhauling of one of the
children's homes we thought we had canvassed thoroughly, the child
turned up, as unaccountably as she had been lost. All that I ever
learned about it was that she had been brought there, picked up by
some one in the street, probably, and, after more or less inquiry that
had failed to connect with the search at our end of the line, had been
included in their flock on some formal commitment, and had stayed
there. Not knowing her name,--she could not tell it herself, to be
understood,--they had given her one of their own choosing; and thus
disguised, she might have stayed there forever but for the fortunate
chance that cast her up to the surface once more, and gave the clew to
her identity at last. Even then her father had nearly as much trouble
in provi