promise me, darlin'!"

"Poor, tired little kiddo, to-morrow before eight, then, to-morrow
before eight we go."

Her head relaxed.

"You're tired out, darlin'. Get to bed, baby. We got a big day
to-morrow. We got a big day to-morrow, darlin'! Get to bed, Vi-dee."

"I wanna spread out her Christmas first, Harry. I want her to see it
when she wakes up. I couldn't stand her not seem' it."

She scurried to the hall and back again, and at the foot of the bed
she spread her gaudy wares: An iridescent rubber ball glowing with
six colors; a ribbon of gilt paper festooned to the crib; a gleaming
Christmas star that dangled and gave out radiance; a huge brown bear
standing upright, and with bead eyes and a grin.

T.B.

The figurative underworld of a great city has no ventilation, housing or
lighting problems. Rooks and crooks who live in the putrid air of crime
are not denied the light of day, even though they loathe it. Cadets,
social skunks, whose carnivorous eyes love darkness, walk in God's
sunshine and breathe God's air. Scarlet women turn over in wide beds and
draw closer velvet curtains to shut out the morning. Gamblers curse the
dawn.

But what of the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes
who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the
Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery
tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight
below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead Chinese;
six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars of
six-million-dollar corporations?

This is the literal underworld of the great city, and its sunless
streets run literal blood--the blood of the babes who cried in vain; the
blood from the lungs of the sweatshop workers whose faces are the color
of dead Chinese; the blood from the cheeks of the six-dollar-a-week
salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars. But these are your problems
and my problems and the problems of the men who have found the strength
or the fear not to die rich. The babe's mother, who had never known
else, could not know that her cellar was fetid; she only cried out in
her anguish and hated vaguely in her heart.

Sara Juke, in the bargain basement of the Titanic Department Store, did
not know that lint from white goods clogs the lungs, and that the air
she breathed was putrefied as from a noxious swamp. Sometimes a pain,
sharp as a hat-pin, entered