Macroeconomics 11th Edition Slavin

Test Bank
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://testbankdeal.com/download/macroeconomics-11th-edition-slavin-test-bank/
Macroeconomics 11th Edition Slavin Test Bank

Chapter 02

Resource Utilization

Multiple Choice Questions

1. The United States economy ______________ operates on its production possibility curve.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

2. Which statement is true?

A. Entrepreneurial ability is in short supply in the U.S.

B. Land, labor and capital may be considered passive resources.
C. The concept of opportunity cost is irrelevant when there is scarcity.
D. None of these statements are true.

3. In the United States' economy

A. there is no need to economize.

B. we rarely have to economize.
C. only the rich have to economize.
D. nearly everyone has to economize.

2-1
Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.

Visit TestBankDeal.com to get complete for all chapters

4. The term "the affluent society" was coined by

A. Michael Harrington.
B. John Kenneth Galbraith.
C. Karl Marx.
D. Adam Smith.

5. Each of the following is an example of an economic resource except

A. land.
B. money.
C. capital.
D. labor.

6. The United States' economy would be operating at full employment with labor unemployment rate
of ___ percent and a capacity utilization rate of _____ percent.

A. 5; 95
B. 5; 85
C. 10; 95
D. 10; 85

7. Which statement is true?

A. On the production possibilities frontier there is zero unemployment.

B. On the production possibilities frontier 95 percent of the labor force is employed.
C. To get out of a recession, we must produce at some point beyond our production possibilities
frontier.
D. To have economic growth, we must push the production possibilities frontier inward.

2-2
Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
8. In order to raise the rate of economic growth we would need to

A. increase the level of capital.

B. reduce the level of labor.
C. spend more on military goods.
D. spend more on consumer goods.

9. The main reason the United States' standard of living is higher than that of India and China is that
we have more

A. land.
B. labor.
C. capital.
D. money.

10. Which statement is true?

A. it is easier to attain full employment than full production.

B. employment discrimination no longer exists in the U.S. labor market.
C. The United States is usually operating on the production possibilities frontier.
D. None of these statements are true.

11. The main effect of employment discrimination is

A. Unemployment.
B. Underemployment.
C. Greater efficiency.
D. Greater production.

2-3
Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Not until the nurse was installed by the bedside of the patient
did Hanson leave the room to go down and get his matutinal cup
of coffee.
For the first time in his life, perhaps, he was beginning to feel
that there were such things as remorse and fear.
For Owlet a dangerous illness followed. Fever and delirium ran
high. She raved incessantly—of all her short, past life, of her pretty
mamma, of the pantomime, of the ballet, of Santa Claus’
Christmas procession, of “Lady,” of “Ducky Darling,” of the
chickens, the garden, the woods—and she warned divers persons—
notably Hanson and the doctor—that they were not possessed of
common sense; but she recognized no one, or mistook them for
some one else, and, strangely enough, she never spoke of her
abduction. The events immediately preceding her illness seemed
to be effaced from her memory.
The doctor was very much interested in the child. He had heard
from Hanson that she was an orphan heiress, who had been left to
his guardianship; that he should have placed her in the care of his
mother and sister, had not those ladies left the country, for a
summer tour in Europe; that now, if the child should happily
recover, he should engage a nurse and a governess for her—
discreet, middle-aged women, and have her under his own
immediate care until the return of his mother and sister from
abroad.
The doctor warmly commended the prudence of the youthful
guardian, and afterward spoke with enthusiasm of “that young
Hanson” as one of the most excellent young men it had ever been
his good fortune to meet.
It was about this time that Hanson wrote his cautious letter to
Roma Fronde, telling her that the child was ill unto death,
breaking her heart for her “Lady,” and that she would certainly die
unless she could be restored to her benefactress; but that she
could only be carried home by him—Hanson—and only on
condition that he—Hanson—should be received with her.
Hanson waited impatiently, from day to day, for an answer to
this letter; but when five days had passed, and none had come, he
wrote again, in stronger terms, but with no better success.
Then he became convinced that she never intended to notice his
letters, no matter how often he might write.
 And now he resolved to do, what he had never before this
thought of doing, though Roma had suspected him of that very
baseness. He resolved to send a private detective down to the
neighborhood of Goeberlin to watch Miss Fronde and find out all
about her—her state, her habits, and her intentions, and report to
him.
He was able and willing to spend a great deal of money on this
venture.
He decided to send his man down in the character of a peddler,
who, while traveling about the country offering his goods to
families and their servants, should make observations and ask
questions. He spared no expense in this evil enterprise. He
purchased a large quantity of miscellaneous goods, and agreed to
give them and all their profits to his agent; to pay his peddler’s
license, his traveling expenses, his hotel bills, and for the cart and
horse the man would have to buy or hire.
For all this he only stipulated that the spy should keep him—
Hanson—informed, by daily letters, of all Miss Fronde’s daily life.
This enterprise was not, however, more successful than
preceding ventures had been.
The first news that Hanson received from his spy was not
encouraging to his hopes. Miss Fronde was not breaking her heart
for the loss of her pet, or for any other cause. That fine young
woman was perfectly well, and actively employed.
In partnership with her clergyman and her solicitor, she was
drawing plans and making contracts for the building of a free
school for colored people on her plantation, and also for a
sanatorium for destitute children and invalids on her seaside
estate, the Isle of Storms.
“Squandering her fortune in that mad manner!” exclaimed
Hanson, in disgust, forgetting that he himself squandered ten
times as much in yachting, racing, gambling and more
objectionable pursuits. “So much for trusting women with wealth.
She ought to have a trustee appointed by the courts to take care of
her estates. If I were her next of kin, I know what I would do. I
would soon stop her mad career.”
The next news he heard from his spy was to the effect that Miss
Fronde was going to Europe in August.
“She is, is she? Then I will go on the same ship and take the
child with me,” said Hanson to himself; and he wrote back to his
man to remain in the neighborhood until Miss Fronde should
leave it for New York, and to come on the same train with her and
report to him. And if the peddler wanted a new stock of goods to
keep him going Hanson would send them.
“I shall see you on the ship, my lady. You can’t get away from
me.”
Meanwhile Owlet had safely passed the crisis of her illness, and
was recovering slowly, very slowly. Her return to consciousness
was very gradual and intermittent.
Though she was gathering some strength of body, she remained
strangely feeble in intellect. She seemed to have forgotten the
details of her abduction, but not the existence of her dear “Lady.”
She begged piteously to be taken back to her “darling Lady.”
She was promised that she should go to her Lady as soon as she
should be well enough to travel, and so she was put off from time
to time.
Hanson told the nurse and the doctor that the lady she talked so
much about had been her nursery governess, to whom she had
been much attached; advised her to humor the child, yet warned
her to try to divert Owlet’s attention from the subject.
But that was quite impossible. “Lady” was the one absorbing
subject of her thoughts by day, and of her dreams by night.
Owlet was a piteous little object as she sat propped up in a large,
white, dimly-covered resting-chair, with her knees and feet
wrapped around with a white coverlet. Her face was as pale and
thin as a living face could be, and her great, brown eyes, which
looked larger than ever in the little, pinched face, had taken on a
pathetic, imploring expression which it was very sorrowful to see.
Hanson seemed very good to her. He bought her toys, picture
books, trinkets, but she turned away her sick eyes from them all,
and pleaded to be taken home to Lady.
Later, when she was well enough to wear them, Hanson bought
for her very pretty dresses, hats and coral necklaces and armlets.
But she looked at them with weary, indifferent eyes, and prayed to
be taken to Lady.
One beautiful, bright Saturday, when she was well enough to go
out, Hanson got an open carriage and took her, with the nurse, to
Central Park to hear the music.
 To almost any child seeing it for the first time, especially on
Saturday, with the bands of music and the thousands of children,
and the variety of sports, the sunshine, the trees, the flowers, the
lakes and ponds, it must have seemed the Garden of Eden revived
—a heaven on earth.
But for homesick and heartsick, pale and large-eyed little Owlet
it had no pleasures.
“Look how beautiful it is!” said Hanson. “Don’t you like it?”
“Not half as well as Lady’s garden! Oh, take me there!” pleaded
the child.
“You shall go as soon as you are well enough,” Hanson
answered.
“Listen to the music, my dear. Isn’t it delightful?” suggested the
nurse, as the whole brass band struck up some jubilant martial air.
“I’d rather hear Lady sing ‘Come Sound His Praise Abroad,’ or
Ducky Darling turn the little broken music box, than the whole of
this! Oh! take me back to them!”
Again she was promised to have her will as soon as she should
be able.
But Owlet was beginning to disbelieve in promises, and to lay
out plans for herself—idiotic little plans, indeed.
The child was like some poor, little, forsaken, puzzled pet dog,
pining for its absent mistress, not knowing how it had been
separated from her, longing to find her, but ignorant where to look
for her in all the wilderness of the world, in all the despairful
immensity of space.
And like this poor, silly, helpless little quadruped, Owlet felt an
irresistible instinct to go away and look for her beloved all over the
great earth until she should find her.
With a cunning beyond her years—a cunning, however, which is
often found in connection with imbecility of mind, and even with
idiocy—she concealed her purpose and watched for her
opportunity.
Owlet was never left alone except when her nurse would go
down to meals—fifteen minutes for breakfast, twenty for dinner—
until sunset, when Mrs. Gilbert would put the child to bed,
arrange her comfortably for the night, leave her safe in the little
room, while generally Hanson would be reading or writing in the
larger room, and go downstairs to join the other ladies’ maids and
children’s nurses at their tea, and where all those whose duties,
like those of Mrs. Gilbert, were over for the day, would remain
gossiping together for an indefinite time.
This was the opportunity which the poor, forlorn, homesick
child resolved to seize, on the first occasion on which Hanson also
should be absent from the outer room.
The occasion came at length.
One afternoon in the early days of May, just as the sun was
setting clear behind the hills of New Jersey, Mrs. Gilbert
undressed Owlet, put her to bed, and then went down to her tea
and her two hours’ gossip. Soon after Hanson came in, dressed for
a party, and kissed Owlet good night. She heard him leave the
room, and then she got out of bed and dressed herself in her very
best clothes, and put on her prettiest coral necklace and armlets,
and her finest hat, made up a little bundle of clothes and pinned
them in a paper, and then left the room and went down—not by
the elevator, but by the stairs—and passed from the house through
the “ladies’ entrance,” without attracting any attention from
anyone but the porter, who opened the door for her, without any
suspicion that there was anything irregular in her going out in that
self-possessed, matter-of-fact manner.
The gas had just been lighted on the streets, and the scene was
very brilliant. The shops were fairy palaces. But Owlet did not stop
to look at any of them, she was much too eager to hurry to “Lady.”
She had no idea of the distance that separated her from her
beloved. Goblin Hall was out of the city among the trees
somewhere. And people must know where it was, and she would
inquire for it, as soon as she should see some one who was not in
such an awful hurry as all the folks seemed to be on this street.
The Owlet of a month before would not have hesitated to stop
the busiest man on the sidewalk and ask to be directed, but the
Owlet of to-day was sad, subdued and timid, and so she walked a
long distance down Broadway, until she came in sight of the trees
in City Hall Park, and was ready to drop with fatigue, for she was
still very weak. She had not found courage to speak to any of the
crowd, until, at length, she saw an old woman, very old, very dirty,
and very ragged, sitting on a cellar door, against the wall of a
house, and with a huge bundle of foul smelling rags on her lap.
Owlet only perceived the poverty, and not the wickedness of the
personality before her. She said to herself:
 “This old woman is not proud, nor busy, nor in a hurry. I will
ask her, and I reckon she will know; and when I get to Goblin Hall
I will have Lady give her some new clothes, and some——”
Then she stopped before the wretch, and said:
“Please, ma’am, will you show me the way to Goblin Hall?”
“Goblet which?” demanded the crone, who seemed to be rather
deaf.
“Goblin Hall.”
“Oh! Goblet Hall! I dunno sich a place. Is it a s’loon or
mus’um?”
“I don’t know what is a s’loon or mus’um, ma’am. Goblin Hall is
a fine house where Lady lives. It has trees, and flowers, and
chickens and Ducky Darling. And, please, I am lost, and can’t find
it.”
“Oh! you are lost?” inquired the crone, devouring, with her eyes
the rich dress, the fine hat and the coral trinkets worn by the child,
and the bundle carried in her hand.
“Yes, ma’am, please, lost; and I want to go home.”
“Where did you say you wanted to go to?”
“To Goblin Hall, ma’am.”
“Oh! I know the place! I’ll take yer straight there, my little lady,”
said the hag, gloating over the finery of the child, and counting
how many glasses of rum she could buy with the money for which
she could pawn the hat, the dress, the coral ornaments, and the
contents of the bundle.
“Oh! thank you, ma’am. Lady will——” Owlet was about to add,
“pay you well for bringing me home,” but an innate delicacy
caused her to pause before offering so poor a woman pay for a
kind action, and to say, instead—“will be ever so much obliged to
you.”
“All right. Come along o ’me,” said the hag, hoisting her huge
bundle upon her shoulders, rising and taking the child’s hand.
 CHAPTER XX
OWLET’S GREAT PERIL

“W’at be yer sniffing at, young un?” demanded the horrible

creature, as she drew the child along, hurrying as fast as she could
down a narrow, crowded street leading out of East Broadway into,
perhaps, the most poverty stricken, squalid, Heaven-forsaken
quarter of the city. “W’at be yer sniffing at?”
“You,” quietly answered truthful Owlet, without a moment’s
hesitation, yet without meaning offense.
“Oh! Me! I’m not nice enough for you, ain’t I, my fine little
Feather?” inquired the crone.
Owlet looked at her.
She was a tall, large-boned, strong old woman, with harsh
features, small, deep-set, pale gray eyes, dark, leathery skin, and
straggling, iron-gray hair. She was clothed in a petticoat and sack,
dark and thick of material, darker and thicker with accumulations
of dirt, and half in rags. Over her head and shoulders she wore a
very ragged old plaid shawl, with the pattern obliterated by dirt.
On her shoulders she bore a huge bundle of rags—a ragpicker by
trade, evidently, very poor probably, though some of her sort have
been known to save and hoard large sums of money; very wicked,
possibly, yet, in any case, to be more pitied than blamed, certainly.
Who are we, who have received sane mental and moral natures
from our forefathers, and have been trained amid favorable
circumstances, to judge our less fortunate brothers and sisters of
this world? We know so little. We can but have faith in the Lord
and charity for them, and with all humility in ourselves.
“Not nice enough for you, eh?” repeated the woman, as they
turned another corner and dived down another narrow, wretched
street.
“Why don’t you take a bath and put on clean clothes?” inquired
Owlet.
 “Why don’t I take a bath and put on clean clothes? Oh, the
innocent arsks me why I don’t take a bath and put on clean
clothes! Oh, he, he, he!” chuckled the ragpicker.
“Lady bathes and changes her clothes every blessed day. And so
do I. Why don’t you?” persisted Owlet, in the interests of health
and cleanliness and—of her own nose.
“She and you is rich belike, and I be poor,” replied the crone.
“But water is cheap enough. Everybody can get as much water
as they want to wash with. Why don’t you?”
“Well, then, Fine Feathers, I ain’t the time to waste in washing. I
has to work for my living, I has.”
“Oh!” said the child, accepting the excuse and trying to
understand it.
But she turned her head away from the ragpicker to try to catch
a whiff of fresh air from the end of the street, that ran to the river.
“A-sniffing ag’in,” said the hag.
“I can’t help it, ma’am,” Owlet said, in apology.
“Oh, she can’t help sniffing! Fine Feathers can’t help sniffing!
He, he, he! If she can’t ’elp sniffing out here in the hopen air, ’ow
will she stand it in the ’ouse? Oh, deary me!” muttered the crone to
nobody in particular, as she turned the last corner in their
progress through this hell and entered a dark and narrow alley
more poverty stricken, squalid and Heaven-forsaken than any
thoroughfare they had yet passed.
The alley ran through the middle of an old city square, and was
flanked on each side by dilapidated brick buildings that had once
been the stables, coach houses, etc., of the rich dwellers in the
mansions fronting on the streets of the square. But as these
mansions had long been turned into stores, saloons and
workshops, so the outhouses had been converted into tenements
of the most objectionable description. But if there were no street
lamps in this alley, neither was there a “dive” or a “bucket shop,”
which might account for the quietness as well as the darkness of
the place.
The sun had so long set that even the twilight had faded away.
No light reached the alley except from the distant lamps of the two
streets upon which it opened, and from an occasional lamp in a
few of the buildings.
 So at this hour there was not much to be seen, but very much
too much to be smelt, for a fetid gutter ran, or rather stagnated,
through the middle of the alley, and seemed to be the receptacle of
all the slops from all the wretched tenements on either side of the
way.
These buildings were all in the last stages of dilapidation in
which it was possible for human beings to find shelter with safety.
Walls were moldering away; doors and window shutters broken
off their hinges or hanging by one hinge, or by a leather substitute;
sashes without glass, and the place of it supplied with foul and
pestilential rags.
It was a thickly crowded yet not a noisy place. In fact, it was so
quiet and almost deserted that it was safe to suppose the wretched
inhabitants who were not in the tumbling tenements were off to
those favorite resorts, the “dives” and “bucket shops” of the
neighboring streets.
Some very few miserable children, and fewer still of more
miserable women, might be dimly seen, here and there, squatting
on the falling front steps of the buildings, or loitering about them.
“I don’t like this place,” said Owlet, as soon as they had turned
into the alley; “I don’t like this place one bit. I wouldn’t live here
for a dollar. I didn’t know we had to come through this place to get
to Lady’s house.”
“Oh, yes, dearie little Fine Feathers. This is the way from where
you came to where Lady lives—the only way, too. You can’t go no
other way not at all,” said the crone, in a conciliating tone.
“Oh, then I am so sorry. Oh, do let’s get out of here as fast as we
can—Oh, phew! what makes people live in such a nasty place as
this when there is ever so much big, beautiful country in the
world?” said Owlet, holding her nose between thumb and finger.
“Oh, the blooming innocent! she arsks why people live in such a
nasty place as this? Lord, I wonder if she thinks they choose?”
inquired the ragpicker of the universe at large. Then looking in
contemptuous pity on the ignorance of her little companion, she
answered to the point: “’Cause they can’t ’elp it. They’s too
blooming poor to be let live anywhere else.”
“Oh, I am so sorry for them! But, please hurry! I can walk faster
if I try. This place does make me so sick!—sick at my stomach! I—
I’m afraid I shall throw up presently,” said Owlet, beginning to
gag.
 “Hold on, Feathers! Oh, hold on! We’ll soon get there now!
Here, smell this ’bacco,” said the ragpicker, drawing from her
bosom a quid of “Old Pig” and offering it to the child.
“Oh, no!—Oh, I can’t!—It—I can’t!—Oh, please hurry!” panted
the child, in great bodily distress.
“Well, now, if as ’ow yer can’t ’bide this one minnit, ’ow do yer
think the poor souls as ’ave to live here all the blooming days of
their lives—day in and day out, night in and night out—can a-bear
it?” demanded, and not without reason, the animated mass of rags
and filth by Owlet’s side.
“Oh, the poor people! Oh, I am so awful sorry for them! I will
ask Lady as soon as ever I get home to take them out of this horrid
place, and give them lovely houses and sweet gardens in the
beautiful country. Lady is awful rich, you know! And good! Oh, so
good! You don’t know—oh, you don’t know how good she is!” said
Owlet, with a philanthropist’s enthusiasm, forgetting her disgust
in her ardor.
“And she’ll do it!” exclaimed the crone, with a harsh laugh of
scornful incredulity—“Oh, she’ll do it! You may depend she’ll do it!
I never seed her face to face, but I know as she’ll do every bit of it.”
“Yes, indeed, she will!” replied ignorant and confident Owlet;
but she faltered as she spoke, and began to totter as she walked,
for the stench of that pest place was penetrating, acrid, insistent.
Owlet was again overpowered.
“Oh, please—go fast—hurry—hurry—out of this—or I shall—
drop down—dead!” she gasped.
“Yes, my pretty little Fine Feathers; in one minute. You see, I
live here, dearie—I——”
“You!” exclaimed the child, momentarily revived by her
astonishment, and interrupting the hag’s speech; but the next
instant wondering at herself for being the least surprised, for it
seemed so natural that this creature should live in just this place.
“Yes,” said the ragpicker, “I bide here, dearie, and I just want to
step inter my place one minnit to get my bunnit to put on my
head, to dress myself up in it, you know, so as to be decent to go
afore genteel folks like your lady is.”
She stopped before the very worst of all the rookeries in that
alley, if that could be said of a house in a place where all houses
were as bad as bad could be, and every one worse than the other—
so to speak.
 “Come along o’ me, Fine Feathers,” said the hag, leading the
unfortunate child up a short flight of rickety, shaking steps, and
through a front door that stood wide open, into a hall that was
even a little more filthy than the alley from which they had
entered.
The only light within it gleamed through partly open doors of
tenement rooms on either side, with interiors indescribably
squalid, and from which came odors insupportably nauseous. The
tenement, in fact, seemed to be a colony of ragpickers.
The dim, gleaming light from the doors ajar showed a narrow,
moldering, broken staircase that led to the floor above.
“Come along o’ me now, dearie,” said the crone, in a coaxing
tone, as she took a faster hold on the child’s hand and began to
draw her up the stairs.
“Oh!—if you please—do take me—out of this—I—I—am dy—dy
——”
And here Owlet fainted away, succumbing to the weakness of an
imperfect convalescence, to great weariness, and, finally, to the
deadly fetor of the pestilential house.
“There! by jingo!” exclaimed the crone, as she picked up the
child, still very thin and light from her recent illness, and easily
carried her up the rickety stairs, that creaked and bent under her
footsteps, to the upper hall, which was flanked each side by
tenement rooms, through whose partly open doors gleamed
flickering lights and streamed foul odors.
“This here is better nor I could ’oped. Saves a desprit deal o’
trouble,” said the ragpicker, as she bore the unconscious child to
the rear of the hall, and paused at a door on the lefthand side,
which she pushed open with her foot.
It gave into a very small room, no bigger than a good-sized
closet. It had but one window, a small, rear window, partly lighted
by a distant lamp that stood in line with it on a cross street. The
only furniture consisted of a huge pile of inconceivably foul rags
that lay on the floor in one corner, reached halfway up to the low
ceiling, and spread more than halfway over the floor.
The woman laid the child down on the edge of the pile of rags,
and found a match and an end of candle, which she lighted and
stuck into the neck of an empty beer bottle.
“I must make haste and git rid on her afore she comes to, and
then she won’t give no trouble to nobody. Lor’, ’ow lucky she
swooned hoff in this here way! Lor’, to think as ’ow I have been
’elped this day in this onexpected manner! First, I comes upon this
here fine bird, with fine feathers, lost into the streets, and with
waluable jewelry onto her neck, and a waluable bundle into her
hand—and where is that bundle, by the same token? ’Opes it never
dropped on the stairs. No! Lor’, there it is, hanging onto Fine
Feathers’ arm still. Never dropped hoff when she fainted, and I
picked her up! Oh! w’at luck this is! And to find the fortin in the
street! And to bring her here! And jest as I were a-thinking how on
airth I could get the clothes offen her back ’thout her raising the
whole alley, she jest faints away like a angel, so quiet and
comfortable! It do seem like a providence, it do, indeed it do! I
wonder what’s in that bundle? But I ain’t got time to look now.
Lor’, no. I must get Fine Feathers outen this afore she comes to, or
there’ll be trouble. Lor’, yes,” concluded the crone, as she hastily
drew Owlet’s bundle off her arm and hid it far under the pile of
rags.
She need not have been in such haste. The swooning child was
not likely to recover in that deadly room. She was much more
likely to die as people die in the fumes of escaping gas or burning
charcoal in an airtight place.
The ragpicker sat down flat upon the floor, and drew the
unconscious child gently across her lap, and proceeded to divest
her of her costly trinkets and rich clothing, all of which she made
into a bundle and thrust it far under the pile of rags.
Then she looked at the beautiful, nude statue of a child that lay
upon the floor, and considered:
“’Twon’t do to take her out that-a-way. But w’at shall I put onto
her? Not a child’s garment in all that pile. Oh! I know,” she
suddenly mumbled. “I roll her in my shawl. I can get another one
to-morrow outen the fortin I have come inter. Them there jew’ls
and frock and things’ll fetch a pile, I know.”
Saying this, she took off her own ragged shawl, laid it over her
knees, drew the nude and senseless form of the child upon it, and
rolled her up in it, securing it here and there by scraps of strings
drawn from the pile, and run through the holes of the wrap.
“That’ll do,” she said, as she took little Owlet in her arms, laid
her head over her shoulder and left the room, on this occasion
taking the precaution to lock the door and put the key in her
bosom.
 “I never do lock my door, except when I’m gwine to bed; but I
guess I’ll do it now, fear of accidents. Though nobody’ll never
guess nothing ’bout the fortin as I’ve got locked up in there. Lor’,
no! They’ll only think, if any on ’em come and try my door, as I’ve
turned in airlier, and some on ’em liars’ll say drunker nor usual.
They’ll never think of the fortin. Lor’, no! If they did, it wouldn’t be
there long. Lor’, no! So I reckon as I had better hurry and get
back’s soon as I can, anyhow,” she concluded, as she went down
the stairs, dark or only dimly lighted by the gleam of candles, or
kerosene lamps, from the partly open doors of the tenement
rooms.
She passed downstairs without being questioned, or even
observed, until she reached the front door, where a woman sat on
the steps, smoking a short, clay pipe.
“Umphe—humphe! There’s Kit, as us’al, filling up the door,”
muttered the ragpicker, as she came upon the smoker.
The latter took the pipe from between her lips, looked up, and
said:
“Evenin’! What’s that you’ve got there, Muck?” calling the crone
by the nickname that had been given her in recognition of her pre-
eminent attainments in squalor.
At any other time the Malebolge of her poor, obscene and
profane soul would have been turned upon the questioner and
deluged her with abuse. But it was now her cue to be conciliating.
“Oh, jest one of my Soph’s young uns as has been spending of
the hevening and taking tea along of me. And I’m a-carrying of her
home to her mammy,” she answered, quite civilly.
“I ain’t seen Soph since she come from the island. Where is she
now?” inquired the younger woman.
“Got a room in Rose Street.”
“Bloomin’ Rose Street that one is. He-he! Where is Soph’s
man?”
“W’ere he ought to be. W’ere I ’ope he’ll stay.”
“Sent up?”
“Yes.”
“Drinking?”
“Yes, and beating of his wife. Wish I’d caught him at it. Better
not let me catch him when he comes out, either. There’ll be a foot
race or a fun’al. More like the fun’al. And me sent furder up nor
him, I reckon—for manslaughter it mought be, and serve him
right. But, here! Let me pass. It’s arfter nine, and I want to get
along with Soph’s kid, ’fear she’ll be oneasy ’bout her. ’Cause, yer
see, she don’ know w’ere she is. I picked her up in the streets, and
fetched her home to take tea ’long of me,” the ragpicker explained.
“Oh! to take tea long of you?” Kit questioned, with a dry laugh.
“Yes, why not?” demanded the crone.
“Oh, nothing. Only I was wondering what stood for tea, and
what on earth it was made in and drunk out of. That’s all.”
The ragpicker would have liked to strangle the young woman
then and there, but she dared not even quarrel with her, so she
answered, with a forced laugh:
“Oh, yer will have your jokes, Kit. Well, to be sure the tea were
only a bottle of ginger beer, drunk outen the bottle, and a bun eat
outen the hand. I forgive yer yer little joke, Kit, my lass. But I
haven’t got time to stop now. I must take the child home.”
Kit laughed, replaced the pipe in her mouth, and moved aside.
The ragpicker passed out to the alley with Owlet in her arms, the
child’s head over the woman’s shoulder.
The crone would have been made anxious by the child’s long
swoon, but that she felt the gentle motion of the little one’s lungs
against her own breast.
She walked down to the end of the alley, and turned the corner
into a crowded street leading down to the East River.
The fresh night breeze from the sea began to revive the fainting
child, who moved and sighed.
“There, there, dearie, it’s all right. Don’t be afeared, my pretty
little Lady Fine Feathers. It’s only me toting of you home to your
dear Lady. Yes, dearie,” whispered the thief.
The exhausted child, scarcely cognizant of herself—not at all of
her surroundings—heaved a deep sigh of weariness, and subsided
into quietness.
The ragpicker walked on, watching her opportunity to drop and
leave the child when she could feel sure of doing so without being
observed.
She met and passed, jostled and was jostled by many foot
passengers on the sidewalks, and she saw and was seen by several
policemen, any one of whom would have stopped and “run her in”
had he had the slightest suspicion of the crime she was
committing. But the sight of a ragged woman with a ragged child
in her arms was a sight too common to draw remark, much less to
excite suspicion.
The ragpicker, however, soon left the more crowded and busier
street, and turned into a less frequented and quieter one.
She knew all the mazes in the labyrinth of that quarter, and she
turned and wound among them like the crawling serpent that
might have been her type.
At length she found what she had been seeking from the time
she had set out on her walk with the child in her arms—a narrow,
quiet street that seemed at this hour to be deserted of all
pedestrian life. Lights gleamed from the windows of the tall
tenements on either side; but no one seemed to be abroad.
Here she looked up and down the street, and then sat down on a
cellar door, against the front wall of one of the tallest houses,
shifted the position of the child from her shoulder to her knees,
and took another survey of her surroundings.
One solitary pedestrian came down the same sidewalk where
she sat with the child on the cellar door, and passed by within two
feet of her without perceiving her in the deep shadows.
When he was gone the thoroughfare was vacant. The stage was
waiting, so to speak.
The old wretch seized the opportunity. She raised the sleeping
child and stood up, looked about, and prepared to lay her under
the steps of the front stoop beside the cellar door, when, to her
confusion, Owlet moved, awoke, lifted her head and inquired:
“Are we almost there?”
The woman knew now that she must soothe and deceive the
child with some plausible pretext for leaving her alone for a
minute—a minute in which she should make her retreat. Else, if
she did not do this, the child would be frightened, would cry, and
—though she saw no policeman—there might be one not too far
off. So she answered:
“Yes, dearie. Pretty little Lucky Fine Feathers, we is almost
there. In fact, almost at the door. But will you jest bide quiet here a
minnit while I go over there and ask that boy which is the best way
to get ’round to the house?”
“Is it a black boy?” Owlet inquired, unconsciously asking a
leading question.
 “Yes, dearie, werry black,” answered the ragpicker, intelligently
following the lead.
“Then that is Puck—poor, dear, old Puck! But he’s not a boy
really, though they call him so, because he’s so little, I s’pose, or
because they forgot to call him anything else. But he is a man
grown, a married man, too, and Ducky Darling’s uncle,” said
Owlet, brightly.
“Oh! is he? Then I’ll go and speak to him directly,” said the
ragpicker.
“Oh, do! And tell him you have found me. And tell him I want to
see them all awful bad, and I’m coming home directly. And, oh!
won’t he be glad? And won’t Lady and Ducky Darling and all of
them be glad? Just as glad as I shall be. For, oh! I know they have
all been grieving about me as much as I have been about them.
Now we shall be so glad! And you shall be glad, too. And the poor
people in that horrid place—I must have gone dead again. How did
you get me out of it?” suddenly inquired Owlet, trying to piece
together the broken threads of her memory.
“Brung you out of it, dearie, while you was in a dead faint,” said
the woman, impatient to be off.
“That—must—have—been so,” said the child, very solemnly—
then she added: “Oh, the poor people what have to live there all
the time! I don’t believe Lady knows about it, or she wouldn’t let
them. But I’ll tell her. And she will take them out of it, and you,
too, and everybody shall be glad. Lady is like an angel in heaven in
her lovely home and garden. She don’t know anything about such
——”
“Hells!” added the crone. “And now I’ll go and fetch the black
boy to tote you home.”
“Oh, yes; go,” said Owlet, eagerly.
The crone turned away, muttering to herself:
“She’ll do. ’Tain’t a cold night for the last of April. And she’s well
wrapped up in my ole shawl, too. Lor’, yes. And the perlice’ll find
her presently, and then she’ll be took to the station and took care
on. And, Lor’, it’s little account she can give of herself to they. It’s
little account she could give to me, as was like a gran’mother to
her, toting her in my arms as if she’d been one of Soph’s own kids.
And, after all, the Ventures of Cruelty will care on her till her own
people turn up. Lor’, yes. She’ll be all right. No fear for her; them
rich allers falls onto their feet, somehows,” concluded the
ragpicker.
And with this “flattering unction” laid to her paralyzed but not
quite deadened conscience, she turned the next corner and wound
in and out through the labyrinth of streets and alleys that lay
between the spot on which she had left the desolate child and the
den which she called her home.
She reached the room at length, opened the door, lighted her
stump of tallow candle, and searched for her stolen booty in the
pile of rags.
She found them safe. She drew them out and gloated over them.
Finally she selected the coral necklace for immediate investment
and replaced all the other treasures under the malodorous pile of
rags.
Then she went forth again, and on this occasion to the nearest
pawnbroker’s shop.
Here she pledged the necklace for two dollars, with which she
bought, at the next groggery, a half gallon of uncommonly
poisonous whisky, even as whisky goes, and then she went back to
her den with joyful anticipations to lock herself in and have what
she called “a glorious drunk” all to herself.
Meanwhile Owlet, hidden under the front steps of that tall
house, waited fearlessly and patiently, without the slightest idea
that she had been left to her fate.
But now the change in her clothing, which in her intense
interest in the prospect of getting home to “Lady’s house” she had
scarcely noticed before, began to trouble her. It irritated her skin
and offended her nose. Still the foul envelope did not suggest foul
play to the unsuspicious child.
“It must have rained while I was gone dead,” she said to herself,
“and that poor, ragged woman took off my wet clothes and hung
them up to dry, and wrapped me in her poor old shawl. It was all
she had, too, poor thing. And it was very good of her. Still, I do
wish she hadn’t. I would rather be soaked to the skin than be so
very, very nasty.”
Just then a policeman passed on his beat. Owlet saw him on the
lighted sidewalk, but she did not know him for a policeman, and
he did not see her, all in the deep shadow of the stoop.
 Still she waited patiently, almost stupidly. It was strange that
she felt no fear, for she did not; strange, also, that she was growing
indifferent, almost unconscious of her noisome change of clothes,
for she was. She was becoming dazed and stupefied by her present
state and by all that she had gone through since her flight, and
even before she was driven to that flight which was so desperate a
venture for a child only six years old.
Sometimes she dozed and started, waked up suddenly, and tried
to gather her scattered thoughts, and wondered why it took so
long a time for her new friend to fetch Puck.
“Oh, I reckon they have gone on to the house to tell Lady I am
found, and to fetch the carriage to take me home, for, after all, the
house must be a good way off from here for me to walk, or for
Puck to carry me. And Lady will come herself, I know.”
With this thought in her mind, the weary child sank to sleep,
and dreamed of being in “Lady’s” garden of delight, among the
glorious flowers, or down the gooseberry walk, or beside the coop
where the bantam “chickies” ran in and out, with Ducky Darling
cooing to them. So passed the hours of that April night.
 CHAPTER XXI
WILL HARCOURT’S ADVENTURE

When Will Harcourt had answered Roma Fronde’s confiding

and affectionate note by a letter of vague confession and final
renunciation, he looked upon his own life as “done and finished,”
so far as any hope in the future was concerned.
What had he to live for?
Roma, his adored, his ideal woman, his muse, his goddess, was
lost to him forever! was worse than lost, for she was repulsed,
repudiated, and by himself.
His youthful ambition was gone forever; was worse than gone,
for it was turned to humiliation, and by his own act.
Oh, misery! Oh, misery!
What had he to live for, indeed?
What?
For one bitter end! To expiate his sin! To toil hard at the
roughest sort of work, among honest laborers, with whom he did
not feel good enough to associate, to look forward to nothing
better than the coming of that bitter day which should deprive him
of his only friend in the death of his aged mother, and leave him
free to deliver his conscience of his guilty secret, nay, constrain
him to denounce himself as a criminal, to give himself up to
justice, to be dealt with according to law, to suffer—what penalty?
Imprisonment, with penal servitude, for the term of his natural
life, must be the lightest doom that could be meted out to him, as
the measure of his great offense.
For the term of his natural life. And he was but twenty-four
years old! A half century of imprisonment and penal slavery.
Well, let it come, he thought, not defiantly, indeed, but humbly.
He had deserved it all. And, long as it might last, it would end
some time. And there was an after life, where faith, repentance
and reformation in this world would surely be followed by rest,
peace and joy in that world to come, where, also, as some believed,
true lovers severed here would meet to part no more forever,
because from their creation their souls had been essentially one,
though apparently two.
And, if this should be true, as some deep inspiration whispered
that it surely was—man might bear patiently, hopefully,
courageously all that the world, the flesh and the devil might
inflict upon him even the hardest of all to bear the disgrace and
penalty of his own sin and folly.
In this mood of mind Harcourt reached New York late one
evening toward the last of April.
He went directly to his lodgings, passed up the four flights of
stairs to the attic floor, and paused a moment in the passage
before his own and his neighbor’s door.
There he heard the old, familiar thumper-thumper-thumper-
thumper of Annie Moss’ sewing machine, going on as he had
heard it all the time he had lived in the next room, as he had heard
it on the evening he had taken leave of her, as if it had never
stopped during the three weeks of his absence.
“Oh, these poor working women!” he thought. “How patient
they are, at their monotonous work! What a lesson it is to others.”
He rapped at the door.
“Well! Who is it?” inquired the pleasant voice, as the sound of
the machine stopped.
“It is I, Annie,” he answered.
Although she was old enough to be his mother, he had got to
calling her “Annie,” because everybody else did, so far as he knew
—Adler and Adler’s wife and their children, all called Mrs. Moss
Annie. The name seemed to suit the fair, gentle, helpful woman.
“Oh, Mr. William, I am so glad that you have come back,” she
said, as she opened the door.
“And I am very glad to see you. I hope you are well?”
“Oh, very well, thank you, Mr. William. I am always well, you
know.”
“And happy?”
“Yes, and happy.”
“You deserve to be so.”