XXXI.

A sallow faced girl for your pity.

On the opposite corner sits a half-grown girl peddling apples.  She polishes the fruit occasionally with a rag that she carries about her person (let us humbly hope it is not her handkerchief!) and now and then breaks into a double shuffle to dissipate the chill that invades her ill-clothed frame.  What taste of joy do you suppose that child ever got out of the pewter cup the fates pour for her?  Does she ever find time to run about with other children, playing the games which the generations hand down from one to the other?  Does she ever play “tag,” or “gray wolf,” or “I spy?” Does she ever swing in a hammock like other girls when the days are long and blithe and sweet, as free from care as a cloud or a butterfly?  Does life hold for her one sparkle in its poor cup of wine, one flavor that is not sordid and low and mean?  You say it is easy to sit here all day selling apples, and wonder why I hold this sallow-faced girl up for special pity.  To be sure there is no hardship in the part of her life visible to us.  But in her dull soul lurks constantly the shadow of an ever present fear.  The poor child is accountable to a cruel master, whether father or mother it matters little, who beats her each night that she returns to her wretched home with a scanty showing of nickels; and the consciousness of dull times and slow sales keeps her in a state of trepidation, which in you or me, my dear, would soon lapse into “nervous prostration,” a big doctor’s fee, and a change of air.  Yet mark my words, if the dark-browed liberator of sorrow’s captives were to proffer my little fruit peddler the exchange of death for all this wearing apprehension and constant toil, do you think she would accept the transfer?  Not she.  The “captain” out snow-balling to-day in her love-guarded home, with never a fear to shadow her sunny eyes, nor a big sorrow to start the showery tears, would not plead harder for the boon of longer living.

XXXII.

And yet he clings to life.

As I sit here by my window I am reminded that this is a queer world and queer be the mortals that pass through it.  There is that wreck of a man over yonder squeezing a bit of weird melody out of an old accordion and expecting the tortured public to throw a penny into his hat now and then to pay him for his trouble.  Do you suppose that man knows what happiness means, as God designed it.  He was, without doubt, a sad and grimy little baby once, brought up on gin slightly adulterated with his mother’s milk.  He was pounded daily before he was two years old, starved and cuffed and kicked all the way up to manhood, and now his neck is so completely under the heel of hydra-headed disaster, wickedness and want, that all he can find to do in this big and busy