In this case, tolerably well-to-do at first, hard times had brought them to this swarming tenement-house, from the various rooms of which, as I passed down the stairs, came the same odor of burning fat and the rank steam of long-boiled coffee or tea.  My errand had been to find the address of a little shop-girl, a niece of Norah’s, a child who had been educated at one of the ward schools, and whom no power could induce to take a place as waitress or chambermaid.  To stand twelve or fourteen hours behind the counter of a Grand street store met her ideas of gentility and of personal freedom far better than yielding to the requirements of a mistress; and the six dollars a week went in cheap finery till the hard times forced her to make it part of the family fund.  Then sore trouble came.  The father had died, the mother was in hospital, from which she was never likely to come out, and Katy, thrown utterly on her own resources, had found her six dollars all inadequate to the demands her habits made, and, frightened and perplexed, went from one cheap boarding-house to another, four or five girls clubbing together to pay for the wretched room they called home, and still striving to keep up the appearance necessary for their position.  Cheap jewelry, banged hair and a dress modelled after the latest extremity of fashion were the ambition of each and all, but neither jewelry nor puffs and ruffles had been sufficient to keep off the attack of pneumonia through which these same girls had nursed her, sitting up turn by turn at night, and taking her duty by day that the place might still be kept open for her.

Katy’s cheeks were flushed and an ominous cough still lingered, but she spoke cheerfully:  “It’s my last day in:  I can go to-morrow.  It’s the beef-tea has done it, I do believe.  Did you know Maria brought it to me every day?  I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

“Learn to make it yourself, Katy.”

“Me?” and Katy laughed incredulously.  “When would I get time? and what would I make it on?  We don’t have a fire but Sundays, and only a show of one then.  And I don’t want it, either:  I ain’t used to it.”

“What do you live on, Katy?”

“Why, we did have breakfast and tea here—­coffee and meat for breakfast, and bread and butter and tea for supper.  I get a cream-cake or some drop-cakes for dinner, but for a good while I’ve just paid a dollar a week for my share of the room, and bought something for breakfast—­’most always a pie.  You can get a splendid pie for five cents, and a pretty good one for three; and it’s plenty too.  That’s the way the girls in the bag-factory do.  They don’t get but three dollars a week, and it takes seventy-five cents for their room, so they haven’t got anything for board.  Mary Jones says she’s settled on pie, because it stays by better’n anything, and once in a while she goes down to Fulton Market and has some coffee.  I do too, but it spoils you for next day.  You keep thinking how’d you’d like a cup when the chills go crawling all over you, but it’s no use.”