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By Root 8617 0

on when they went in. She didn't like that much, but what she liked best in al the world were the il ustrated songs that came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in colors like tinted flowers and such lovely dresses and big hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was nothing but mudflats and the slimysmel y piles and the boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and weepingwil owtrees hanging over them. After that it was vaudevil e. There were acrobats and trained seals and men in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced.

-169-The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black hats tipped up so wonderful y on one side and their sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and yel ow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.

The trouble with going to Hol and's Beach was that

Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and a smel of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and halfway through the good time, Margie would see that worried meek look coming over Agnes's face, and then she'd know that there would be no more fun that day. The last time they al went over together to the beach they lost Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that everybody stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor who was a friend of Fred's came over and tried to tel her not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse. Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kil herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn't have to face the people on the train ever again. That time Fred didn't turn up the next day the way he usual y did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told him he'd seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that he didn't think he'd come home for a while. Agnes made Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe Hines's in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into bed with her. Her cheeks were' fiery hot and she kept say-ing, "Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker.

. . . Margie. . . . We can't stand this life any more, can we, little girl?"

"I bet he'd come here fussing, the dreadful old thing," said Margie.

"Something like that. . . . Oh, it's too awful, I can't

-170-stand it any more. God knows I've worked my fingers to the bone." Margie suddenly came out with, "Wel , when the cat's away the mice wil play," and was surprised at how long Agnes laughed though she was crying too.

In September just when Agnes was fixing up Margie's dresses for the opening of school, the rentman came round for the quarter's rent. Al they'd heard from Fred was a letter with a fivedol ar bil in it. He said he'd gotten into a fight and gotten arrested and spent two weeks in jail but that he had a job now and would be home as soon as he'd straightened things out a little. But Margie knew they owed the five dol ars and twelve dol ars more for gro-ceries. When Agnes'came back into the kitchen from talk-ing to the rentman with her face streaky and horrid with crying, she told Margie that they were going into the city to live. "I always told Fred Dowling the day would come when I couldn't stand it any more. Now he can make his own home after this."

It was a dreadful day when they got their two bags and the awful old dampeaten trunk up to the station with the help of Joe Hines, who was always doing odd jobs for Agnes when Fred was away, and got on the train that took them into Brooklyn. They went to Agnes's father's and mother's, who lived in the back of a smal paperhanger's store on Fulton Street under the el. Old Mr. Fisher was a