“What is your name? where do you live?  I shall have to see your mother and talk to her,” said Miss Margery.

“My name’s Peggy Callahan and we live out that way,” waving her hand northward.  “There ain’t no number to the house.  You go down this street till it turns to a road and you come to a gate marked ‘No Thoroughfare’ and you go straight through it and follow the path and you come to a little brown house with red roses on the porch.  That’s our house.  Oh! there’s two with roses!  One is a colored lady’s.  Ours is the one with the so many children.”

“I know your mother.  And I remember the place,” said Miss Margery, writing a few lines in her notebook.  “I am going out that way this afternoon and we will see what can be done.”

“Thank you, lady,” said Peggy, and bounded away.

“I’d better send you home, Anne,” said Miss Margery, with a little sigh, “and let you go with me some other time.  This place is a long way off, much farther than I had expected to go this afternoon.”

“Please, Miss Margery, let me go,” pleaded Anne.  “I never get tired.  And I do want to go through the ‘No Thoroughfare’ gate, and see the little brown house with the red roses and the children.”

Miss Margery hesitated, then consented, and she and Anne trudged through the dingy suburb of shabby, scattered houses.

“P’rhaps I oughtn’t to have come,” said Anne, rather doubtfully.  “It’s cobblestones.  They skin shoes.  Cousin Dorcas says she doesn’t know where money’s coming from to buy another pair.  I asked her if we couldn’t get you to give me some shoes, like you do Albert and those other children, and it made her cry.  She said that would be a disgrace.  Why, Miss Margery?”

“Miss Dorcas does not like to have people give her things,” said Miss Margery.

“But Mrs. Collins gave me a dress and a hat and ever so many things.  And I need shoes.  I need them bad as Albert did.  If I don’t get some pretty soon, I can’t go to school.  Why mustn’t you give them to me?”

Miss Margery did not undertake to explain.  “Don’t worry about shoes to-day,” she said.  “Be careful where you walk and don’t stump your toes.  Those shoes look pretty well still.  Miss Dorcas crosses bridges sometimes before she comes to them.  Why, there’s Albert Naumann.  Good-afternoon, Albert.  Have you any pennies for the saving bank to-day?”

“No, madam, lady,” answered Albert.  “I have no time for to earn the pennies to-day.  I have for to pick up the coal for mine Mutter.  It makes the hands to be dirty”—­looking at his blackened fingers—­“but it saves the to buy coal.”

“That is good, Albert,” said Miss Margery, heartily, “better than earning pennies for yourself.  Can you show me where the Callahans live?  Anne tells me Peggy is your classmate.”

“Yes, madam, lady,” answered Albert, “it’s the second house on the path back of those trees.”

“There’s the house,” exclaimed Anne, a few minutes later.  “I know that’s it.  It’s little and it’s brown and look at the roses—­and the children!  It’s like the old woman that lived in a shoe.”