hrinking, cowering, timorous figure of Anna Czarnik, scrub-woman on the
sixth floor. Her hand still on her shoulder Martha Foote led her to the
centre of the room, where she stood, gazing dumbly about. She was the
scrub-woman you've seen in every hotel from San Francisco to Scituate. A
shapeless, moist, blue calico mass. Her shoes turned up ludicrously at
the toes, as do the shoes of one who crawls her way backward, crab-like,
on hands and knees. Her hands were the shrivelled, unlovely members that
bespeak long and daily immersion in dirty water. But even had these
invariable marks of her trade been lacking, you could not have failed to
recognise her type by the large and glittering mock-diamond comb which
failed to catch up her dank and stringy hair in the back.

One kindly hand on the woman's arm, Martha Foote performed the
introduction.

"This is Mrs. Anna Czarnik, late of Poland. Widowed. Likewise childless.
Also brotherless. Also many other uncomfortable things. But the life of
the crowd in the scrub-girls' quarters on the top floor. Aren't you,
Anna? Mrs. Anna Czarnik, I'm sorry to say, is the source of the
blood-curdling moan, and the swishing, and the clanking, and the
ghost-raps. There is a service stairway just on the other side of this
wall. Anna Czarnik was performing her morning job of scrubbing it. The
swishing was her wet rag. The clanking was her pail. The dull raps her
scrubbing brush striking the stair corner just behind your wall."

"You're forgetting the wail," Geisha McCoy suggested, icily.

"No, I'm not. The wail, I'm afraid, was Anna Czarnik, singing."

"Singing?"

Martha Foote turned and spoke a gibberish of Polish and English to the
bewildered woman at her side. Anna Czarnik's dull face lighted up ever
so little.

"She says the thing she was singing is a Polish folk-song about death
and sorrow, and it's called a--what was that, Anna?"

"Dumka."

"It's called a dumka. It's a song of mourning, you see? Of grief. And of
bitterness against the invaders who have laid her country bare."

"Well, what's the idea!" demanded Geisha McCoy. "What kind of a hotel is
this, anyway? Scrub-girls waking people up in the middle of the night
with a Polish cabaret. If she wants to sing her hymn of hate why does
she have to pick on me!"

"I'm sorry. You can go, Anna. No sing, remember! Sh-sh-sh!"

Anna Czarnik nodded and made her unwieldy escape.

Geisha McCoy waved a hand at the mulatto maid. "Go to y