w
vat you call God vill laugh. He vill say, 'Ah, now I haf dem all. De
fool fader and de fool moder, dey may live.'"

"Brita! poor Brita!" the man said softly, and added some words in his
own tongue. She pushed him away, then burst into wild weeping and sank
down on the floor.

"He will be her best comforter," the doctor said. "We will go now, and I
will see them all to-morrow. That money will get the coffin," she added
as she laid a bill on the table and then went softly out, "but the
coffin would not have been needed if help could have come three months
ago."

"I thought it was some drunken home," I said, "but that man can never
have gone very far wrong. He has a noble head."

"No, it is only hard times," she answered. "Go again, and you will learn
the whole story, unless you choose to hear it from me."

"No," I said as we stood under the shelter of the still unfinished
Franklin Square Station on the elevated road, "I will hear it for myself
if I can."

The time came sooner than I thought. A month later I went up the dark
stairs, whose treacherous places I had learned to know, and found the
room empty of all signs of occupation, though the bed and table still
stood there.

"They're gone," a voice called from below. "They've come into luck, Pat
says, but I don't know. Anyhow, they turned out o' here yesterday, an'
left the things there for whoever 'd be wantin' 'em."

"Bad 'cess to the furriner!" said another voice as I passed down.
"Comin' here wid his set-up ways, an' schornin' a bit of dhrink!"

"An' if ye'd take patthern of him yerself--" the woman's voice began,
and was silenced by a push back into her room and the loud slam of the
door.

"They have come to better times surely," the janitor said as I asked
their whereabouts at the mission, "an' here's their new number. It's a
quiet, decent place, an' he'll have a better soon."

After Cherry and Roosevelt and Water streets, Madison street seems
another Fifth Avenue. The old New Yorker knows it as the once stately
and decorous abode of old Dutch families, a few of whom still cling to
the ancient homes, but most of these are now cheap boarding-Pouses and
tenements, while here and there a new genuine tenement-house is
sandwiched between the tiled roofs and dormer-windows which still hold
suggestions of former better days. The more respectable class of
'longshoremen find quarters here, and some of the mission-people, who,
well-to-do enough to seek quiete