Ghetto Silhouettes

from a keen love of nature, and from having been brought up in a library. Her New England parents and grandparents had put by much money, which enabled her to taste of the good things of life, especially of travel, art, and literature. She loved ancestry, and no wonder, for her forebears were people worth loving. They had been intensely religious, and this hereditary quality reappeared in her character and work. Her emotions, artistic and otherwise, ran to religious subjects and things pertaining to the ethical side of humanity. One day Mary and I went down into the great slums which lie east of the Bowery. We carried sandwiches, fruit, and flowers for a poor family which Mary had unearthed and inwardly pledged herself to care for as far as she could without infringing upon their self-respect. We also went to meet Philip, a wonderful little Russian Jew or Lithuak, who was Mary's ideal of what Jesu must have been in his youth when he confronted the learned doctors in the Temple. She had spoken of him so often that I was eager to meet him. Philip was not at home when we reached the frightful abode which he called by that name. So at least said an urchin who stood in the dark doorway of the tenement-house. Mary and I climbed the dirty stairs, stumbling on splinters and broken boards, and at one point almost falling over a huge box, which was half full of garbage and debris. On an upper floor we entered a small apartment, in which eight people lived. It wa...