One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services.  He had been in the room before.  It was not one of the worst, for though small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers, there was an attempt to make it tidy.  In a dark closet opening out from it was another large bed.  As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that Gretchen was not at home.  Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift of St. George’s, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who looked round wearily at the priest.  The mother was washing clothes in a tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a slop-shop.  The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the daytime.  Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was Dr. Leigh.  As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped, hesitating, upon the threshold.

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid to come in, Father Damon,” she cried out; “it isn’t contagious—­only rash.”

Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who had turned from the tub, “I’ve no doubt you are disappointed that it isn’t contagious!” And then, to the mother:  “Where is Gretchen?  She doesn’t come to the chapel.”

“Nein,” replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, “it don’t come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl.”

“What, all day?”

“Yaas, by six o’clock, and abends so spate.  Not much it get, but my man can’t earn nothing any more.”  And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.

“But, on Sunday?” Father Damon asked, still further.

“Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem oder girls.”

“Don’t you think it better, Father Damon,” Dr. Leigh interposed, “that Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?”

“Und such bootiful tings by de Museum,” added the mother.

“Perhaps,” said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then changed the subject to the sick child.  He did not care to argue the matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad ways.  The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but their daily struggle for life.  Yet she had a mother’s instinct about the danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father Damon’s chapel.