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“What shall I do with it?” cried this young Cornelia, looking helplessly around upon her fellows. “Whenever my Jimmie behaved like this I used simply to ring for Louise. I never knew what she used to do with him.”

Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown snorted. “A nurse!” said she, “a hireling! You relegate a mother’s sacred responsibilities to a servant.” Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had never enjoyed these responsibilities, and so was eloquent and authoritative upon them.

Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and feet touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on the milieu of the meeting.

“If we knew,” said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically, “what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal for it.”

“It hardly looks,” interrupted another, “like the Mellin’s Food and Nestle’s Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements.”

“And yet,” said the practical member, “we can’t do anything until we know what it’s accustomed to. With so young a child—-“

Here the door opened and an unenrolled Cornelia was added to the gathering. Her red and yellow kimona rose and fell with her quick breathing. Defiance shone in her black eyes.

“You got mine baby,” declared Rosie Rashnowsky. “Why couldn’t you leave her be where I put her, you old Miss Fix-its? You scared me most to death until I heard her yellin’.”

With these ungrateful remarks she advanced upon the ministering group and snatched the inverted infant from the colic theorist.

“This is the top of her,” she pointed out. “I guess you didn’t look very hard.”

Before the discredited practitioner had formed a reply the Cornelia in spectacles was ready to remark:

“We think your baby is hungry.”

“Sure is she,” Rosie concurred; “ain’t babies always hungry?”

“And if you will tell us what you feed her on,” the lady continued, “we will send out for some of it before you take her home.”

Rosie was by this time established in a chair with the now only whimpering baby upon her lap.

“Don’t you bother,” she genially remonstrated. “I just bought her something.”

And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper. She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it into the baby’s waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. “Pickles!” they cried, and shuddered. “Do you often give that baby pickles?”

“I do when I can get ’em,” Rosie answered, “but that ain’t often.”

And then this injudicious but warm-hearted audience drew from her the sordid little story which seemed such a matter of course to her, and such a tragedy to them.

“Und I looks,” said Rosie, “all times I looks on cellars und push-carts und fire ‘scapes und stores und sidewalks. Und I walks und I walks–all times I walks–mit that baby in mine hand, und I couldn’t to find me the papa. Mine poor mamma, she looks too, sooner she goes und comes on the factory, und by night me und mine mamma, we comes by our house und we looks on ourselves und we don’t says nothings, on’y makes so”–and Rosie shook a hopeless head–“und so we knows we ain’t find him. Sometimes mine mamma cries over it. She is got all times awful sad looks.”

By this time the more sentimental among the Cornelias were reduced to tears, and the more practical were surveying such finances as they carried with them, and in a very short time an endowment fund of nearly fifty dollars had been collected. The sang-froid which had throughout the proceedings distinguished Rosie was a little shaken when this extraordinary shower of manna was made clear to her, but it vanished altogether when, upon the suggestion of the practical and bespectacled Cornelia, the assistant janitor was sent for to give safe-conduct to the children and their bequest. And the amazement of Isidore Rashnowsky–summoned from the furnace room for some uncomprehended reason–was hardly less ecstatic when he found himself in the close embrace of his frenzied daughter. For Rosie’s joy was nothing less than frenzy.