direction, and in due time with the help of other policemen she reached
the right number on Flora Street.

It was a narrow street, banked on either side by small, narrow brick
houses of the older type. Here and there gleamed out a scrap of a white
marble door-step, but most of the houses were approached by steps of dull
stone or of painted wood. There was a dejected and dreary air about the
place. The street was swarming with children in various stages of the
soiled condition.

Elizabeth timidly knocked at the door after being assured by the
interested urchins who surrounded her that Mrs. Brady really lived there,
and had not moved away or anything. It did not seem wonderful to the girl,
who had lived her life thus far in a mountain shack, to find her
grandmother still in the place from which she had written fifteen years
before. She did not yet know what a floating population most cities
contain.

Mrs. Brady was washing when the knock sounded through the house. She was a
broad woman, with a face on which the cares and sorrows of the years had
left a not too heavy impress. She still enjoyed life, oven though a good
part of it was spent at the wash-tub, washing other people's fine clothes.
She had some fine ones of her own up-stairs in her clothes-press; and,
when she went out, it was in shiny satin, with a bonnet bobbing with jet
and a red rose, though of late years, strictly speaking, the bonnet had
become a hat again, and Mrs. Brady was in style with the other old ladies.

The perspiration was in little beads on her forehead and trickling down
the creases in her well-cushioned neck toward her ample bosom. Her gray
hair was neatly combed, and her calico wrapper was open at the throat even