comments on the change in the weather.

The Wiggses lived in the Cabbage Patch. It was not a real cabbage
patch, but a queer neighborhood, where ramshackle cottages played
hop-scotch over the railroad tracks. There were no streets, so when
a new house was built the owner faced it any way his fancy prompted.
Mr. Bagby's grocery, it is true, conformed to convention, and
presented a solid front to the railroad track, but Miss Hazy's
cottage shied off sidewise into the Wiggses' yard, as if it were
afraid of the big freight-trains that went thundering past so many
times a day; and Mrs. Schultz's front room looked directly into the
Eichorns' kitchen. The latter was not a bad arrangement, however,
for Mrs. Schultz had been confined to her bed for ten years, and her
sole interest in life consisted in watching what took place in her
neighbor's family.

The Wiggses' house was the most imposing in the neighborhood. This
was probably due to the fact that it had two front doors and a tin
roof. One door was nailed up, and the other opened outdoors, but you
would never guess it from the street. When the country house burned,
one door had been saved. So Mrs. Wiggs and the boys brought it to
the new home and skilfully placed it at the front end of the side
porch. But the roof gave the house its chief distinction; it was the
only tin roof in the Cabbage Patch. Jim and Billy had made it of old
cans which they picked up on the commons.

Jim was fifteen and head of the family; his shoulders were those of
a man, and were bent with work, but his body dwindled away to a pair
of thin legs that seemed incapable of supporting the burden imposed
upon them. In his anxious eyes was the look of a bread-winner who