"Sam, have you ever been in the country?"

It was Michael who asked the question. They were sitting in a small dismal room that Michael had found he could afford to rent in a house on the edge of the alley. Not that he had moved there, oh, no! He could not have endured life if all of it that he could call his own had to be spent in that atmosphere. He still kept his little fourth floor back in the dismally respectable street. He had not gone to the place recommended by Endicott, because he found that the difference he would have to pay would make it possible for him to rent this sad little room near the alley; and for his purposes this seemed to him an absolute necessity at present.

The weather was growing too cold for him to meet with his new-old acquaintances of the alley out of doors, and it was little better indoors even if he could have endured the dirt and squalor of those apartments that would have been open to him. Besides, he had a great longing to show them something brighter than their own forlorn homes.

There was a settlement house three or four blocks away, but it had not drawn the dwellers in this particular alley. They were sunken too low, perhaps, or there were so many more hopeful quarters in which to work; and the city was so wide and deep and dark. Michael knew little about the settlement house. He had read of such things. He had looked shyly toward its workers now and then, but as yet knew none of them, though they had heard now and again of the "Angel-man of the alley," and were curious to find him out.