Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-09-07

had told to some children story. 1t was
about a great black dragon which swal-
lowed up everything beautiful that came
its way and left behind it in Its track
only dust and ashes.
How often the hawthorne tree thought
of that story i'll the years that came after
the SCOT first fell on lite blossoms. Great
London was the dragon. How it crept
onward, how II swallowed up the green
fields. the flowers, the trees, the hedges
with the birds nests in them, the clean
country roads, the cottages with matched
roofs and diamond PANIED windows,
with tiny white curtains and flower pots
IN them. How it swallowed up the fresh
rosy children and their games and laugh
ter. And In its track 1t left hundreds of
dngy houses, hundreds of tall chimneys,
hundreds of black, close, ugly streets,
thousands of pale, hungry looking peo-
pie, some with worn out faces, some with
cunning, EVIL ones, some simply duh and
brutal
1t was not the rich and gay part of
London which had orawled out TO the
hawthorne tree and beyond 1t; If il had
been so perhaps the tree might not have
feared and hated it so and called it a
dragon. It might then have had quite q
different idea and have been delighted
with the bright luminous world il would
have seen, with the carriages and horses,
the beautiful women and pretty children.
But il was only the wretched, squalld
part the hawthorne tree saw. And after
u long time, when its heart wasialmost
broken, and it really thought that things
could not be any worse, it found out
that it lived on what was called the East
End, and in one of the worst and most
crowded parts of it.
1t was a long time, too long for the
hawthorn tree TO calculate, the months
and years, before the worst came to the
worst, before all the air was thick with
sitting smoke and unhealthy odo-s, be-
fore the miserable houses had huddled
themselves together onto wretched, filthy
streets, where wretched filthy people
starved and quarreled and fought, and
suffered aud died, where little children
cursed each other as they played in their
rags IN the cutters, where their drunken
mothers staggered aud fell on the pave
ments or on the steps of the noisome
houses and slept their horrible besotted
sleep. There were alley ways and courts
where decent people dared not go in the
broad day and in the dreadful rooms were
packed together drunkards and thieves,
aud sometimes murderers hiding from
Justice. And oh, the hunger and the
pain and the helplessueSs OF the little
ones born there. The hawthorne tree
used to tremble at the sight of them
more than ut the sight OF the great heavy
brutal men who lounged about or crept
stealthily round corners or banded
coarse jokes with each other. They had
such pale, cunning old little faces with
stuuted bodies, such unchildish ways,
when they played or fought together.
They we're most of them used to oaths
and lies and tricks and abuse; the first
they were not troubled by, the last they
were sharp at slipping out Of the way of.
They we're all alike in one thing, how
ever, they all liked the hawthorne tree,
black and scanty-leaved and unlike itself
sS lis troubles had made il.
TO BE CONTINUED.