th the other old ladies.

The perspiration was in little beads on her forehead and trickling down
the creases in her well-cushioned neck toward her ample bosom. Her gray
hair was neatly combed, and her calico wrapper was open at the throat even
on this cold day. She wiped on her apron the soap-suds from her plump arms
steaming pink from the hot suds, and went to the door.

She looked with disfavor upon the peculiar person on the door-step attired
in a man's overcoat. She was prepared to refuse the demands of the
Salvation Army for a nickel for Christmas dinners; or to silence the
banana-man, or the fish-man, or the man with shoe-strings and pins and
pencils for sale; or to send the photograph-agent on his way; yes, even
the man who sold albums for post-cards. She had no time to bother with
anybody this morning.

But the young person in the rusty overcoat, with the dark-blue serge Eton
jacket under it, which might have come from Wanamaker's two years ago, who
yet wore a leather belt with gleaming pistols under the Eton jacket, was a
new species. Mrs. Brady was taken off her guard; else Elizabeth might have
found entrance to her grandmother's home as difficult as she had found
entrance to the finishing school of Madame Janeway.

"Are you Mrs. Brady?" asked the girl. She was searching the forbidding
face before her for some sign of likeness to her mother, but found none.
The cares of Elizabeth Brady's daughter had outweighed those of the
mother, or else they sat upon a nature more sensitive.

"I am," said Mrs. Brady, imposingly.

"Grandmother, I am the baby you talked about in that letter," she
announced, handing Mrs. Brady the letter she had written nearly eighteen
years before.

The woman took the envelope gingerly in the wet thumb and finger that
still grasped a bit of the gingham apron. She held it at arm's length, and
squinted up her eyes, trying to read it without her glasses. It was some
new kind of beggar, of course. She hated to touch these dirty envelopes,
and this one looked old and worn. She stepped back to the parlor table
where her glasses were lying, and, adjusting them, began to read the
letter.

"For the land sakes! Where'd you find this?" she said, looking up
suspiciously. "It's against the law to open letters that ain't your own.
Didn't me daughter ever get it? I wrote it to her meself. How come you by
it?"

"Mother read it to me long ago when I was little," answered the girl, the
slow hope fa