e ye to sit that long at
the table, sis?'" The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.

Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the
floor.

"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
her; "my mother----"

They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for
her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
thirteen years.

Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell's
Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be "took," the
moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
hastily d