yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.

I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a
picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door,
and let me into the darkened kitchen.

His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would
take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head gave
her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her
sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her
hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a
minute.

I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have
never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave
me enough of her meaning.

She was telling me that Frank had spoken to her of me last night when he
returned from the blessed settlement. He always came to her bedside,
nowadays, knowing that she would be awake and waiting to hear where he
had been. And so he had whispered, while his father slept, of the
strange young man who was so kind--a Jew, like them--and yet who had no
faith in God.

Then suddenly she began to beg something. "Mutter, mutter," was all I
could make of it--and I guessed that she was asking me of my mother, and
wondering why I did not listen at her knee as Frank had done at his own
mother's. And when I told her that my mother was dead, tears came into
her eyes, and this was the finest sympathy I had ever known.

For she put her big, buttery hand on mine and shook her head. "You must
learn to know God," I think she said. "He alone can take your mother's
place. He made my son what I longed he should be. He will make you what
you most desire. In God alone is there happiness."

And so Frank and I went out and down the dirty, narrow stairs, and came
into a street of Heaven itself--a street of early sunlight, and a clear
sky above--and morning smiles upon the faces of all passersby. Or so it
seemed to me, at any rate.

Because, for once in my life, I had seen the happiness of mother and
child swept up into glory that is God's.

And I laughed to think of Mr. Richard's remark that religion works harm
among these East Side people.

XIV

AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW

The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment
of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was
personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and play