She could not, she would not, give him up.  He must take his chances.  Ah, but they were hard chances!  Children mature fast under the stimulus of street-training.  Andy had a large brain and an active, nervous organization.  Life in the open air gave vigor and hardness to his body.  As the months went by he learned self-reliance, caution, self-protection, and took a good many lessons in the art of aggression.  A rapidly-growing child needs a large amount of nutritious food to supply waste and furnish material for the daily-increasing bodily structure.  Andy did not get this.  At two years of age he had lost all the roundness of babyhood.  His limbs were slender, his body thin and his face colorless and hungry-looking.

About this time—­that is, when Andy was two years old—­Mrs. Burke took sick and died.  She had been failing for several months, and unable to earn sufficient even to pay her rent.  But for the help of neighbors and an occasional supply of food or fuel from some public charity, she would have starved.  At her death Andy had no home and no one to care for him.  One pitying neighbor after another would take him in at night, or let him share a meal with her children, but beyond this he was utterly cast out and friendless.  It was summer-time when Mrs. Burke died, and the poor waif was spared for a time the suffering of cold.

Now and then a mother’s heart would be touched, and after a half-reluctantly given supper and a place where he might sleep for the night would mend and wash his soiled clothes and dry them by the fire, ready for morning.  The pleased look that she saw in his large, sad eyes—­for they had grown wistful and sad since the only one he had known as a mother died—­was always her reward, and something not to be put out of her memory.  Many of the children took kindly to Andy, and often supplied him with food.

“Andy is so hungry, mamma; can’t I take him something to eat?” rarely failed to bring the needed bread for the poor little cast-adrift.  And if he was discovered now and then sound asleep in bed with some pitying child who had taken him in stealthily after dark, few were hard-hearted enough to push him into the street, or make him go down and sleep on the kitchen floor.  Yet this was not unfrequently done.  Poverty is sometimes very cruel, yet often tender and compassionate.

One day, a few months after Mrs. Burke’s death, Andy, who was beginning to drift farther and farther away from the little street, yet always managing to get back into it as darkness came on, that he might lay his tired body in some friendly place, got lost in strange localities.  He had wandered about for many hours, sitting now on some step or cellar-door or horse-block, watching the children at play and sometimes joining in their sports, when they would let him, with the spontaneous abandon of a puppy or a kitten, and now enjoying some street-show or attractive shop-window.  There was nothing of the air of a lost child about him.  For all that his manner betrayed, his home might have been in the nearest court or alley.  So, he wandered along from street to street without attracting the special notice of any—­a bare-headed, bare-footed, dirty, half-clad atom of humanity not three years old.