is
body. As the months went by he learned self-reliance, caution,
self-protection, and took a good many lessons in the art of aggression.
A rapidly-growing child needs a large amount of nutritious food to
supply waste and furnish material for the daily-increasing bodily
structure. Andy did not get this. At two years of age he had lost all
the roundness of babyhood. His limbs were slender, his body thin and his
face colorless and hungry-looking.

About this time--that is, when Andy was two years old--Mrs. Burke took
sick and died. She had been failing for several months, and unable to
earn sufficient even to pay her rent. But for the help of neighbors and
an occasional supply of food or fuel from some public charity, she would
have starved. At her death Andy had no home and no one to care for him.
One pitying neighbor after another would take him in at night, or let
him share a meal with her children, but beyond this he was utterly cast
out and friendless. It was summer-time when Mrs. Burke died, and the
poor waif was spared for a time the suffering of cold.

Now and then a mother's heart would be touched, and after a
half-reluctantly given supper and a place where he might sleep for the
night would mend and wash his soiled clothes and dry them by the fire,
ready for morning. The pleased look that she saw in his large, sad
eyes--for they had grown wistful and sad since the only one he had known
as a mother died--was always her reward, and something not to be put
out of her memory. Many of the children took kindly to Andy, and often
supplied him with food.

"Andy is so hungry, mamma; can't I take him something to eat?" rarely
failed to bring the needed bread for the poor little cast-adrift. And
if he was discovered now and then sound asleep in bed with some pitying
child who had taken him in stealthily after dark, few were hard-hearted
enough to push him into the street, or make him go down and sleep on the
kitchen floor. Yet this was not unfrequently done. Poverty is sometimes
very cruel, yet often tender and compassionate.

One day, a few months after Mrs. Burke's death, Andy, who was beginning
to drift farther and farther away from the little street, yet always
managing to get back into it as darkness came on, that he might lay his
tired body in some friendly place, got lost in strange localities.
He had wandered about for many hours, sitting now on some step or
cellar-door or horse-block, watching the children at