Los Angeles herald., 1910-02-13
OLD WOMAN NEARLY
STARVED IS RESCUED
FROM VILE TENEMENT
Cops Save Poor Blind Soul from an
Empty Larder, Fireless Room
and--Worse, She Thinks
Lonesomness

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 12.-Some
time or other some genius yet unborn
may discover just why 1t is that the
fates usually select a thirdfloor back
room in which to pull off their mean
est tricks. When the fates get
strangle hold on you and, despite all
your struggling and yelping, finally
iiu jitsu you into a third-floor back,
it is time to take a long breath and
then use it in a mighty call for help
from somewhere.
Third floors back, with the wood of
the floor worn down so that every
nail stands up in little mound, with
bleak windows, and the janitor knock
ing for his rent, ard no heat out OF
the radiator and the wall paper peel
ing from the ceiling, have been set
tings for more silent tragedies than
Ibsen could have chronicled if he had
written with both hands for 1000 years.
And it would be hard to conceive of
a bleaker one than that which Police
men Slook and Dersen of the Third
and Dickinson streets station house
broke into yesterday afternoon, When
they felt their way through dark
ened hallway to the barren and cold
third-floor back at 1927 South Sixth
street. In this particular third-foor
back there was a tiny stove, in Whicn
the fire had died out days ago, and
crumpled in a chair before it and all
alone was a gray little old woman,
in whose face was all the strange, in
def1nable usefulness of the very, very
old who have been long blind.
Old Woman Grateful
And the little old gray woman
reached out an uncertain hand and
touched the basket of food for which
the cops had hurriedly ravaged the
neighborhood when they found what
was going on in this third floor back,
and she said that God had always been
kind to her and that she had, indeed,
been hungry for many days, but that
her greatest trouble had been lone
someness. Her name, she said, was
Mrs. Mary Portend, and her friends
and her children had all been dead
and gone these many years.
Three months ago the doctors had
come and taken her husband away to
die in a hospital and had left her quite
alone. And since she was blind and
i'll and since the weather had been so
terrible that she couldn't even go out
to beg a bite, why, of course, she said,
it had been rather hard.
Now. the little old gray woman and
her husband didn't get into the third
floor back without a bitter struggle,
and, both blind, they clung together
valiantly indeed while the unseen cur
rents harried them along darkened
ways and left them eddying helplessly
in the loneliest back waters of all the
city.
The little old woman whispered it all
yesterday-of how they had been able
to get along by doing odd bits of bas-
kct weaving and chair Gaming and SO
on, and had hoped to be able to stick
it out together to the end and main
tain their own little home. She meant
the third floor back.
And so they would have made out,
she said, if it hadn't just happened that
they both got sick at the same time.
So off went the old man in an am
bulance to the Pennsylvania hospital,
to leave little, gray, hungry and blind
old woman forsaken in the poor wreck
age of this ambitious enterprise. And