In a corner of Frau Nirlanger\'s bedroom, sheltered from draughts and glaring light, is a little wooden bed, painted blue and ornamented with stout red roses that are faded by time and much abuse. Every evening at eight o\'clock three anxious-browed women hold low-spoken conclave about the quaint old bed, while its occupant sleeps and smiles as he sleeps, and clasps to his breast a chewed-looking woolly dog. For a new joy has come to the sad little Frau Nirlanger, and I, quite by accident, was the cause of bringing it to her. The queer little blue bed, with its faded roses, was brought down from the attic by Frau Knapf, for she is one of the three foster mothers of the small occupant of the bed. The occupant of the bed is named Bennie, and a corporation formed for the purpose of bringing him up in the way he should go is composed of: Dawn O\'Hara Orme, President and Distracted Guardian; Mrs. Konrad Nirlanger, Cuddler-in-chief and Authority on the Subject of Bennie\'s Bed-time; Mr. Blackie Griffith, Good Angel, General Cut-up and Monitor off\'n Bennie\'s Neckties and Toys; Dr. Ernst von Gerhard, Chief Medical Adviser, and Sweller of the Exchequer, with the Privilege of Selecting All Candies. Members of the corporation meet with great frequency evenings and Sundays, much to the detriment of a certain Book-in-the-making with which Dawn O\'Hara Orme was wont to struggle o\' evenings.

Bennie had been one of those little tragedies that find their way into juvenile court. Bennie\'s story was common enough, but Bennie himself had been different. Ten minutes after his first appearance in the court room everyone, from the big, bald judge to the newest probation officer, had fallen in love with him. Somehow, you wanted to smooth the hair from his forehead, tip his pale little face upward, and very gently kiss his smooth, white brow. Which alone was enough to distinguish Bennie, for Juvenile court children, as a rule, are distinctly not kissable.

Bennie\'s mother was accused of being unfit to care for her boy, and Bennie was temporarily installed in the Detention Home. There the superintendent and his plump and kindly wife had fallen head over heels in love with him, and had dressed him in a smart little Norfolk suit and a frivolous plaid silk tie. There were delays in the case, and postponement after postponement, so that Bennie appeared in the court room every Tuesday for four weeks. The reporters, and the probation officers and policemen became very chummy with Bennie, and showered him with bright new pennies and certain wonderful candies. Superintendent Arnett of the Detention Home was as proud of the boy as though he were his own. And when Bennie would look shyly and questioningly into his face for permission to accept the proffered offerings, the big superintendent would chuckle delightedly. Bennie had a strangely mobile face for such a baby, and the whitest, smoothest brow I have ever seen.

The comedy and tears and misery and laughter of the big, white-walled court room were too much for Bennie. He would gaze about with puzzled blue eyes; then, giving up the situation as something too vast for his comprehension, he would fall to drawing curly-cues on a bit of paper with a great yellow pencil presented him by one of the newspaper men.

Every Tuesday the rows of benches were packed with a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians—a crowd made up of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends, and enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands of the big man seated in the revolving chair up in front. But Bennie\'s mother was not of this crowd; this pitiful, ludicrous crowd filling the great room with the stifling, rancid odor of the poor. Nor was Bennie. He sat, clear-eyed and unsmiling, in the depths of a great chair on the court side of the railing and gravely received the attentions of the lawyers, and reporters and court room attaches who had grown fond of the grave little figure.

Then, on the fifth Tuesday, Bennie\'s mother appeared. How she had come to be that child\'s mother God only knows—or perhaps He had had nothing to do with it. She was terribly sober and frightened. Her face was swollen and bruised, and beneath one eye there was a puffy green-and-blue swelling. Her sordid story was common enough as the probation officer told it. The woman had been living in one wretched room with the boy. Her husband had deserted her. There was no food, and little furniture. The queer feature of it, said the probation officer, was that the woman managed to keep the boy fairly neat and clean, regardless of her own condition, and he generally had food of some sort, although the mother sometimes went without food for days. Through the squalor and misery and degradation of her own life Bennie had somehow been kept unsullied, a thing apart.

“H\'m!” said judge Wheeling, and looked at Bennie. Bennie was standing beside his mother. He was very quiet, and his eyes were smiling up into those of the battered creature who was fighting for him. “I guess we\'ll have to take you out of this,” the judge decided, abruptly. “That boy is too good to go to waste.”

The sodden, dazed woman before him did not immediately get the full meaning of his words. She still stood there, swaying a bit, and staring unintelligently at the judge. Then, quite suddenly, she realized it. She took a quick step forward. Her hand went up to her breast, to her throat, to her lips, with an odd, stifled gesture.

“You ain\'t going to take him away! From me! No, you wouldn\'t do that, would you? Not for—not for always! You wouldn\'t do that—you wouldn\'t—”

Judge Wheeling waved her away. But the woman dropped to her knees.

“Judge, give me a chance! I\'ll stop drinking. Only don\'t take him away from me! Don\'t, judge, don\'t! He\'s all I\'ve got in the world. Give me a chance. Three months! Six months! A year!”

“Get up!” ordered judge Wheeling, gruffly, “and stop that! It won\'t do you a bit of good.”

And then a wonderful thing happened. The woman rose to her feet. A new and strange dignity had come into her battered face. The lines of suffering and vice were erased as by magic, and she seemed to grow taller, younger, almost beautiful. When she spoke again it was slowly and distinctly, her words quite free from the blur of the barroom and street vernacular.

“I tell you you must give me a chance. You cannot take a child from a mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I\'ve traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy into it. Look at him!”

Our eyes traveled from the woman\'s transfigured face to that of the boy. We could trace a wonderful likeness where before we had seen none. But the woman went on in her steady, even tone.

“I can\'t talk as I should, because my brain isn\'t clear. It\'s the drink. When you drink, you forget. But you must help me. I can\'t do it alone. I can remember how to live straight, just as I can remember how to talk straight. Let me show you that I\'m not all bad. Give me a chance. Take the boy and then give him back to me when you are satisfied. I\'ll try—God only knows how I\'ll try. Only don\'t take him away forever, Judge! Don\'t do that!”

Judge Wheeling ran an uncomfortable finger around his collar\'s edge.

“Any friends living here?”

“No! No!”

“Sure about that?”

“Quite sure.”

“Now see here; I\'m going to give you your chance. I shall take this boy away from you for a year. In that time you will stop drinking and become a decent, self-supporting woman. You will be given in charge of one of these probation officers. She will find work for you, and a good home, and she\'ll stand by you, and you must report to her. If she is satisfied with you at the end of the year, the boy goes back to you.”

“She will be satisfied,” the woman said, simply. She stooped and taking Bennie\'s face between her hands kissed him once. Then she stepped aside and stood quite still, looking after the little figure that passed out of the court room with his hand in that of a big, kindly police officer. She looked until the big door had opened and closed upon them.

Then—well, it was just another newspaper story. It made a good one. That evening I told Frau Nirlanger about it, and she wept, softly, and murmured: “Ach, das arme baby! Like my little Oscar he is, without a mother.” I told Ernst about him too, and Blackie, because I could not get his grave little face out of my mind. I wondered if those who had charge of him now would take the time to bathe the little body, and brush the soft hair until it shone, and tie the gay plaid silk tie as lovingly as “Daddy” Arnett of the Detention Home had done.

Then it was that I, quite unwittingly, stepped into Bennie\'s life.

There was an anniversary, or a change in the board of directors, or a new coat of paint or something of the kind in one of the orphan homes, and the story fell to me. I found the orphan home to be typical of its kind—a big, dreary, prison-like structure. The woman at the door did not in the least care to let me in. She was a fish-mouthed woman with a hard eye, and as I told my errand her mouth grew fishier and the eye harder. Finally she led me down a long, dark, airless stretch of corridor and departed in search of the matron, leaving me seated in the unfriendly reception room, with its straight-backed chairs placed stonily against the walls, beneath rows of red and blue and yellow religious pictures.

Just as I was wondering why it seemed impossible to be holy and cheerful at the same time, there came a pad-padding down the corridor. The next moment the matron stood in the doorway. She was a mountainous, red-faced woman, with warts on her nose.

“Good-afternoon,” I said, sweetly. (“Ugh! What a brute!”) I thought. Then I began to explain my errand once more. Criticism of the Home? No indeed, I assured her. At last, convinced of my disinterestedness she reluctantly guided me about the big, gloomy building. There were endless flights of shiny stairs, and endless stuffy, airless rooms............