It was quite a story.  Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself.  Juozapas had only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a little child, but he had got himself a broomstick, which he put under his arm for a crutch.  He had fallen in with some other children and found the way to Mike Scully’s dump, which lay three or four blocks away.  To this place there came every day many hundreds of wagonloads of garbage and trash from the lake front, where the rich people lived; and in the heaps the children raked for food—­there were hunks of bread and potato peelings and apple cores and meat bones, all of it half frozen and quite unspoiled.  Little Juozapas gorged himself, and came home with a newspaper full, which he was feeding to Antanas when his mother came in.  Elzbieta was horrified, for she did not believe that the food out of the dumps was fit to eat.  The next day, however, when no harm came of it and Juozapas began to cry with hunger, she gave in and said that he might go again.  And that afternoon he came home with a story of how while he had been digging away with a stick, a lady upon the street had called him.  A real fine lady, the little boy explained, a beautiful lady; and she wanted to know all about him, and whether he got the garbage for chickens, and why he walked with a broomstick, and why Ona had died, and how Jurgis had come to go to jail, and what was the matter with Marija, and everything.  In the end she had asked where he lived, and said that she was coming to see him, and bring him a new crutch to walk with.  She had on a hat with a bird upon it, Juozapas added, and a long fur snake around her neck.

She really came, the very next morning, and climbed the ladder to the garret, and stood and stared about her, turning pale at the sight of the blood stains on the floor where Ona had died.  She was a “settlement worker,” she explained to Elzbieta—­she lived around on Ashland Avenue.  Elzbieta knew the place, over a feed store; somebody had wanted her to go there, but she had not cared to, for she thought that it must have something to do with religion, and the priest did not like her to have anything to do with strange religions.  They were rich people who came to live there to find out about the poor people; but what good they expected it would do them to know, one could not imagine.  So spoke Elzbieta, naively, and the young lady laughed and was rather at a loss for an answer—­she stood and gazed about her, and thought of a cynical remark that had been made to her, that she was standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing in snowballs to lower the temperature.