CHAPTER II.
CHRISTMAS EVE IN NEW YORK.
There was no snow in New York that Christmas Eve, but the wind seemed colder for that, as it blew in sharp biting gusts through the dark streets and alleys, and sweeping up a long flight of rickety stairs to one of those tenements where the poor live,—God only knows how,—crept through the wide cracks of a room where two little girls crouched before the fire, which the elder of them was trying to coax into a blaze. She had been out all day in the crowded streets offering her pins and shoe-lacings and matches, first to one and then to another of the gay throng hurrying by, all, or nearly all, in too great haste to notice her, shivering with cold and pinched with hunger though she was. Had they done so, they would have seen that she was no ordinary chi
