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S Father Kazinci and I walked through the Braddock alleys we bent our heads to the thin rain without speaking. I had been accompa nying him on a round of parochial visits, and we did not talk because there seemed nothing adequate to say.

From the rampart of mills rolled up august clouds of smoke; this smoke mounts up night and day and never stops, coil on coil, cloud on cloud. It darkens the sky, obscures the sun. Its architectural patterns-white on black, black on gray, sulphur and black and gray vary in stately fashion throughout all the hours. It is always there, a symbol across the heavens of the never-ending toil going on within the mills.

Clustered about the foot of the mills live the workers. The houses are of two stories, and are mostly of brick. One set of houses faces the street, the other the court. The courts are bricked, and littered with piles of tin cans, piles of rubbish, bins of garbage, hillocks of refuse, refuse and litter, litter and refuse; and playing in the refuse and ashes and piles of cans, and with them, children.

I remember a certain bin of ashes and refuse. I had seen it in the fall, filled with ashes and putrefying vegetables and pieces of half-decayed old clothes. Now the tide of garbage and ashes had risen and overflowed half-way across the street; children dug in the ashes and scaled the garbage-pile valiantly, one little boy beating like cymbals two tin cans.

They played here because there was nowhere else to play. There was nothing else to play with, so they played in the garbage-piles. They stamped their heels into the tin cans and skated across the frozen courtyard, where the thin sooty rain froze upon the bricks.

Although school was not yet out, there was no end to the children. As Father Kazinci stopped to talk to a parishioner, they came flocking, greeting him with their treble "Good-day, Father," or, shyness coming between them and words, then with smiles. You could count them -bands of fifteen, eighteen, twenty.

Braddock was the cradle of the steel industry. Its mills existed before the great Homestead Mills. Carnegie Steel was born in Braddock. The mills grew, ramparting the Monongahela River, a frieze of mighty black chimneys belching forth their perpetual smoke; they spread to Rankin, to Homestead, to Duquesne. It might be supposed that the chief product of Braddock and the other steel towns is steel.

This is not true.

Their principal product is children.
Swarms of children.

Hundreds and hundreds of children. Generation after generation of children, born where no green thing grows, reared before the somber magnificence of the smoke which blankets the sky and obscures the sun. Generations of chil

BY MARY HEATON VORSE

dren playing in the refuse; hundreds upon hundreds whose only playgrounds are the forsaken bricked courtyards or the littered streets.

It was the spectacle of these children which made Father Kazinci and myself so silent in this round of parochial visits. House after house full of beautiful children, house after house where mothers had made attempts at beauty, where each poor adornment said, "I would not live here if I could live differently;" where the ornaments cried out, "I love beauty and color;" where the begonias growing in cans told of dreams of green fields and gardens.

All of Braddock is black; the soot of the mills has covered it. There is no spot in Braddock that is fair to see. There is no park, no open space; litter everywhere, a town of slack disorder, of scant selfrespect. The people who have made money in the Braddock Mills live most of them in surrounding towns, away from the noise and clatter and dirt.

The steel workers who can, escape up to the hillsides; they go to North Braddock or to Wolftown; but many and many of them are condemned forever to the First Ward.

What condemns them to live in these slums is their children. The more children, the less chance of escape. This is an axiom. Here in these homes which we had just visited live the people of unfulfilled dreams. Here live the people whose hopes are constantly betrayed by every accident, the people without a margin.

Throughout the steel strike there was no group of people who stuck so firmly as did these Slovaks down in the Braddock slums. They would be striking yet; they were sorry to go back. The strike, to them, had meant opportunity; it had meant a road of escape; it had meant besides a court of appeal at last for grievances.

This is one of the things in the present condition of the steel industry which the workers find most difficult to bear. There is no way of presenting one's grievances. If you don't like your work, you can leave. This lusty, splendid industry, with its quantity production, is an autocracy.

It is as though principalities had ceased to exist as geographical areas, but exist now by industries. These principalities are young, and they have all the despotism of youth and power-of power that is builded only on wealth and dominion, not on honor and glory. Power without responsibility. Power which can treat men's lives as commodities. Power which throttles among its subjects all efforts at self-government. Power, brutal, young, riotous, lusty, driven by the force of steam. A creative thing, made of fire and iron, and taking no account of the lives of the puny men shriveling before the blast furnace.

Smoke, fire and iron and human lives are its substance. Gain and greed and

the despair of many men are woven into the fabric of its lusty, unthinking despotism. Against this despotism the workers had revolted. They had been beaten. We had been visiting in this trail of the strike.

At last Father Kazinci spoke: "If you analyze what we have heard to-day, it means something like 'No advancement for the Slavs.' They cannot help giving them jobs, but they will give them as poor ones as they can. I wonder if John has his job." He looked toward a boy of twenty-one who was coming toward us.

"He was my most brilliant pupil. When he had to leave school, I wept. He comes from a most remarkable family. There are six boys; each one of them deserves a college education. I have to face no more bitter thing than to see one after another of my ambitious boys swallowed up by work. It's hard with all of them, but with this boy it was nothing short of a crime; though he could not be kept down. When the strike came, he was on the road of advancement to chemist of the company.

We were face to face with him by now. "How do you do, Father?" "How are you, my boy? Did you get your old job back?"

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No, Father."

Why not?"

"I don't know, Father; they wouldn't give it to me."

"Were you very active in the strike, my boy?"

"No, Father."

"You didn't stay around strike headquarters a lot?"

"No, Father; I was home."

"When you went for your job, what did they say to you?"

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They said,What's your name?' and when I told them they said: 'Nothing doing for you. We're not going to have nothing but Americans in the chemical department after this."" He had spoken in a quiet, lack-luster voice, and now bitterness broke out of him. "What makes an American ?" he demanded. "Wasn't

I born here? Weren't all of us born here? Ain't the boys like my brother Joe who volunteered as good Americans, even if they have got 'ski' or 'ko' to their names -as good Americans as the fellows called White or Smith? I'll say they are! They said so too while the war was on. You remember the poster Americans all!' Say, Father, the man who made that picture ought to work in Carnegie Steel. He'd learn the difference between American and a damn hunkey' quick enough!"

an

Again there was nothing to say. We had no answer for his bitterness. The thin rain fell on us. Some tow-headed children near had made a cheerful slide down the alley; an old woman, her head enveloped in a kerchief after the fashion of the peasants of Central Europe, toiled and slid along in her big shoes, carrying a

load of wood. Almost every one in Allegheny County cooks by gas except the steel workers of the slums. A silence as frozen as the rain held us. The boy broke the silence.

"What nationality do you suppose my little son is?" he asked. "He is only the third generation here. I guess he ain't got any country."

We walked on down the bleak alley, with its swarming tow-headed children who had found a plaything in the brittle surface of the icy pavement. At the end of the street towered the huge tank-like bulk of the mills, and over it rolled the heavy symphony of the smoke, menacing and magnificent; smoke that seemed to carry with it the promise of thunder and lightning.

"That boy's mother is a wonderful woman," said Father Kazinci. "She has eleven children, and each new one as it comes along she shows to me like a gift from God." We turned down a passage way which led down hill into a courtyard. The courtyard was lined around with smoke-blackened pens where the tenants kept hens and animals. The heaps of filth defacing the court were now covered with a thin purifying coating of ice. Five paces from the front door, on a slightly higher level, stood a privy common to several families. Near the door was a bench, on which sat a row of fowls, like everything else, shining with ice; while over the door projected three blackened boards-a shelter from the burning sun when the sweltering court became a brick oven, but now cutting out what little light there was. The brick house had been painted light blue, which gave it a cheerful air.

A smell of old grease, of drying clothes, rushed fiercely at us as we opened the basement door. A wide-bosomed woman who rocked a cradle greeted us. She was a strong woman, heavy, still comely, almost handsome, the mother of many sons. She broke into a torrent of greeting in her own tongue. Father Kazinci translated:

"She says, Father, you see me here in my bare feet and my rags. I have been here twenty-two years, and I live as you see. This is all I have these rags, this cellar, my eleven children. Every night I bless God, who has kept them in good health. For twenty-two years, Father, I have worked from morning till night, and often late at night, but after all this work we have nothing to give them but this." She waved her hand about the room.

There were two small windows which did not open, a slit of a window behind where the front part of the house was higher than the courtyard, a stove, a table, four chairs, benches under the window, a cupboard with some dishes, while at one side of the room a staircase led upstairs, and on one side was a bright frieze of holy pictures. On the floor above the father and mother slept with the five younger children. In an attic room slept the four boys. Always there had been another baby. Before they could make a plan to escape from this cellar a new baby had come.

Peter and Lisa, the babies now in the room, had come the same year. John had had to leave school because other brilliant children were being born to the Savkos. Child after child, the pride of their teachers-the rising tide of aspiring young life had condemned those older to this filthy had condemned those older to this filthy courtyard.

Lisa stood on the bench, her head silhouetted against the window. In her hand she held two flat pieces of gum;. with these she made a cross against the window-pane, then a T, then an angle, then she put them carefully in her pinafore pocket. Then, tranquil, serious, absorbed, she looked at a book standing there, and so continued in her little world while her mother talked.

Father Kazinci translated: "Would I live here if I could get out? Would I live here, would I remain where the dirty water of the privy overflows and crawls over the court under the doorsill until it makes a pool on my kitchen floor? Is that a view for children to look at year after year, year after year? To keep them clean I must wash out in the yard. Look, missus, this is my apron!" She brought a stiff oilcloth apron, still frozen. "I wash out in the cold, so I won't splash water over my children, so they can have a dry place to play. Eleven souls to keep clean here in this Braddock means work."

She continued her story, illustrating it with wide and ample gestures:

"On Christmas we were all here, Johnny and his wife and the baby. Father, you see this little room and this small table, these few chairs? Fifteen. souls. Some ate. I cleared away. Others sat down. The little girls sat on the stairs. Two boys used the black stove for a table. The children laughed and were happy because there was goose and stuffing, but my heart was heavy. Must the children eat from the floor like pigs even on this day of our blessed Lord? It was no comfort to me that he was born in a manger. For this one day I would have shortened my life if we could only all have sat down together. If only we might all of us, young and old, have celebrated Christmas by eating together at one table. I thought how beautiful if we could all have sat down together, each in his own chair, each with his own plate and knife and fork, on this one holiday. What happiness !"

Lisa put both arms around her mother, who gathered her up. Her arms had always been full of babies. You could have told that by the way she enfolded Lisa. She went on with her story. There was in it one green spot of delight.

Once, when Joe and John had been babies, she and her husband had $180 saved, and they had gone to Holyoke and visited a sister. They would have stayed, but there was no work for the father to do. That had been eighteen years before, but the memory of the wide Connecticut Valley and the sweet New England towns still gladdened this woman's heart.

The children began coming in from school. Tic, tac, toe, three little girls, Mary, Annie, Susie. They dragged a

table out from underneath the big table and sat upon it, playing. Happiness lived in this meager room. It was a home made abidingly good by that undaunted, courageous mother. Here people were kind to one another. The little girls played together quietly with the harmony of children accustomed only to love.

Stevie came in, and George. The baby waked up, and his mother took him in her arms. The window was a luminous square of dark blue. She sat there, silhouetted against it, enormous, her head erect in the defense of her own. As the dusk deepened the children came to her, crowding themselves into her flanks.... The three little girls stood on one side, Steve next, and then George.

She was talking: "Ah, my dears, that was a terrible time-yes, yes, that was the time! That was the time! Despair stared at me. Despair was stronger than God's hand. Despair walked at night beside me. They laid him off-they laid off our father! We were on strike just now, but it was the company that was striking then! I had Annie in my arms, another coming, seven mouths to feed! What can I do? I sat one day for six hours in the boss's office. 'I will stay on my knees here,' I thought, until he takes our father back. Even if it is a slack time, there is some work,' I thought, 'they must give him to do.'

"It was at that time I used to buy rags from the ragman-the rags the Americans had thrown away-and wash them clean and patch them and make clothes for the babies. What could I do?

"That was when my Johnnie went to work. He was thirteen. Ah, it broke my heart! He found himself work at night, so he could study at day. For a year he held the hot links of chains in a pincers from five o'clock at night until three in the morning, but the hot metal hurt his eyes. His eyes were always red, but he would not give up. You remember, Father, he did this for a year. He would fall asleep over his books, poor boy!

"Oh, my dear, misfortune has followed me from the day I left my own land. One misfortune after another. Now it is Stevie who must work."

"What do you do, Stevie?" "I set up pins in the bowling alley from six till half-past eleven. I get five dollars."

"How could I help it, Father? It is always the same, so many mouths to fill." She looked at us with her extraordinary intensity and cried out: "Would to God I had never come! Would to God I had never seen this land! Would to God I had remained where, if we had no school, we might have had blue sky and green fields about us! What good does it do them the few days of schooling? With them it is a thirst and a hunger for knowledge, and I must hunger and thirst with them and see them starve for the knowledge they cannot have. What is the meaning, Father? Why should things be so?"

She sat there in the dying light with

her children around her, easing her overburdened heart by her talk. This was all she knew of America: The wide currents of our country had never touched her. Opportunity had proved illusion. There had been one glimpse into the country which we so love; for the rest she had lived within the iron autocracy of the steel town.

Yet she was the woman whose praise poets have sung down the ages—the unselfish mother. What could any one have taught her in this country? Not a greater devotion, surely. Nor could she have learned to make a better home. Its enveloping goodness was as unescapable as light an atmosphere in which those

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children throve. For them she fought a continual battle with the three fears which cloud the lives of all working people-the fear of unemployment, the fear of illness, and the fear of old age.

As I sat there and listened to this story of thwarted dreams I felt as if I had been trying to keep from crying for a long time. I was angry, and I was right to be angry. My country was being robbed before my eyes of its greatest wealth; it was being robbed of its ambi tious children.

John Savko, whose brilliant mind clamors to be fed and who worked a year heating the links of chains rather than leave school; then Andy, Joe, Mike,

and now Steve putting up pins in the alley at night.

Perhaps when Joe comes back from the Navy things will be better for this family so disinherited from things which we are proud to call American.

The door opened, and Johnny came in. Upstairs the father and Andy, the third son, were sleeping-both on the night shift. They were all gathered under one roof now, this family of aliens who had lived among us for twenty-three years in so precarious a fashion. John spoke. "Father," he said, "I found out the name of the American fellow who got my job." He spoke without irony. "It was O'Rourke.

UT you haven't told me what you think of this portrait," said the artist.

He pointed to a canvas that I had deliberately ignored all afternoon, though from its place on the big easel it dominated the whole studio. And when he met my appealing "Oh, must I?" with a grin that meant "I won't let you off this time!" I said, desperately: "Well, it's diabolically clever, technique and all that -you couldn't paint a portrait that wasn't brilliant, and you know it, so don't fish for compliments. May I have another cup? Not quite so much cream this time, please."

"You may, if you'll talk about the portrait-here, put in your own cream, will you?" He pushed the tea-table nearer and took the lid off the muffin dish. “Go ahead and take that buttery one; you needn't be afraid of getting fat, you're too high-strung. No fear of your acquiring a nice, comfortable figure like the lady on the easel. Tell me, Anne, why are you so peeved about that portrait? You don't like something about it. What is it?"

"I don't like your having painted it," I faid, crossly. "Why should you take a lient like that-a rich old vulgarian in sables and point lace and diamonds? With your sympathy and insight, you ought to do the kind of old age that is beautiful, that one falls in love with

"Whistler's 'Mother'?" "Exactly, or any other sympathetic study of an elderly woman who isn't just a Mrs. Croesus. That's a cruel portrait, Bob, a covert sneer. What does the poor old soul think of it? She can't really like it."

He pointed to the masterly brushwork that made the painted necklace wink and glitter in the firelight. "Well, she thinks the diamonds aren't quite bright enough," he drawled, looking at me out of a quiz zical eye. "So I've promised to touch 'em up a little. Oh, you needn't put on such a disgusted expression! That's perfectly good criticism from Mamma Bronson's point of view."

I set down my cup with an impatient

BY SARAH REDINGTON

clatter. "I'm disgusted at your taking orders from that kind of person. You've arrived, Bob, so that you can pick and choose. Why not do only the people who are worth while?"

"Oh, I'm pretty choosy most of the time," he said, slowly, with a wave of his hand towards a canvas on which a few masterly strokes just hinted at the likeness to be."That little girl over there— I'm doing her because she's worth while, she interests me. And I turned down a grapejuice baron the other day because I didn't like his nose."

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Well, if I were a successful portrait painter I'd turn down vulgarians because I didn't like their vulgarity. Other things being equal, I should think you'd prefer to do people with souls, characters, temperaments-oh, you know what I mean! I don't understand you, Bob. You look at that painful portrait as if you had a real affection for it. Have you grown so mercenary that your best work is the work that pays you best-when it isn't a question of a nose you don't like ?" I spoke heatedly, but then my husband says I'm three-quarters idealist.

By way of answer the artist said: "Take off your coat, why don't you? That's a pretty hot fire since I put on the big log." And when I looked my surprise at the sudden change of subject, he added: "I'm going to tell you the story of that portrait, if you don't mind, and you might as well be comfortable while I have the floor. No, you can't go for at least twenty minutes; Tom said he wouldn't call for you till six, and you won't see him then if he gets into a bridge game at the club." Then he began his story, his eyes fixed affectionately on the portrait.

To begin in the middle (said the artist), I was tickled to death at the commission. As it happened, I'd had a run of sweet subjects débutantes in their frilly tulle dresses, little girls in smocked frocks and pink hair ribbons-you can see it from here. So I felt downright savage, and as if I wanted to get my teeth into

something hard; if a cave man had come in, I'd have done him for nothing, just for the fun of painting something ugly and brutal and strong, for a change. Well, no cave man applied, but Mrs. Bronson strayed into my studio instead. I don't mean that the poor old soul was either ugly or brutal, but she was a heavensent challenge to a piece of stiff work. For I saw right off the bat that here was my chance to get away with an interesting experiment. You know how Sargent can paint a vulgarian, so that the vulgarity simply leaps out at you_from the canvas? Well, the moment I saw Mamma Bronson, I said to myself: "Here's a common old person who measures everything by her money. Go to, I will paint her portrait à la Sargent. It's the chance of a lifetime!" The Bronsons wouldn't see it, not clever enough, but I'd make a big hit with the intelligent public who would recognize the portrait as a covert sneer-the very words you used a little while ago, by the way. Yes, I certainly put it over, if I could make you feel that. But honestly, Anne, it was too easy. It was like taking candy from a child.

In the first place, she was tickled to death at my letting her wear what she liked. She told me naïvely that she had been afraid I would insist on "something artistic;" she said her daughter had two friends who dressed artistically in cheesecloth and gunny-sacks. "I prefer velvet and lace," I said, and you ought to have seen her beam. "I'll wear my new mauve velvet, then," she said, joyously, "and the sable stole poppa gave me last Christmas, and❞—here she hesitated and looked embarrassed-" would you mind. if I put on lots of jool'ry?" "All you want, Mrs. Bronson," I assured her, and you'd never guess why the hesitation. It was because I got this later from her in a burst of confidence-she had been afraid "jool'ry" would be hard to paint, and she didn't want to ask too much of me. Can you beat it?

Well, at last we got started, with a piece of valuable tapestry behind her