She sank again into the chair beneath the screeching gas-jet.  “Grit,” she repeated dully, “was a stone wall.”  And between very honest, tired, and lonely tears she began slowly to spell out the words of the coverless book, having gained within the past few hours some understanding of what it means in the battle of life to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

There came another afternoon, another evening, another year, and still another; but this narrative covers merely a part of two days—­Great Taylor’s first and last as a junk-woman.  The latter came nearly ten years after the burial of Grit.  For almost a decade Nell followed in his grimy footprints and the polyglot people of the lower East Side, looking down from their windows as she passed through the congested streets pushing steadily with head bent, thought of her either as an infinitesimal molecule at the bottom of the mass where the light of idealism seldom penetrates or else as a female Colossus striding from end to end of the Devil’s Own city only ankle-deep in the debris from which she wrested an existence.  But to Great Taylor it seemed not to matter what people thought.  She sang her song through the cavernous streets, the only song she knew:  “Rags, old iron, bottles, and ra-ags.”  She pounded with a huge, determined fist on alley gates, she learned expertly to thread the traffic and to laugh at the teamsters, their oaths, their curses.  “They ain’t so bad.”  And, finally, bickering and bargaining with men of all classes, she came to wonder why people called this the Devil’s Own city.  In all those years of toil she did not once see him in the eyes of men.  But there came the day when she said, “I’m done.”

On this day Great Taylor lifted the end of a huge kitchen range against two struggling members of the other sex.  A pain shot through her breast, but she carried her part of the dead weight, saying nothing, and, at high noon, pushed her jingling, jangling cart through streets sharply outlined with sunlight and shadow to a dilapidated brick warehouse that, long since, had taken the place of Grit’s junk-yard.

There, in the interior gloom of the shabby old building, could be seen piles of broken, twisted, and rusty things—­twisted iron rods, broken cam-shafts, cog wheels with missing teeth, springs that had lost their elasticity—­a miniature mountain of scrap iron each piece of which at some time had been a part of some smoothly working machine.  In another pile were discarded household utensils—­old pots and pans and burnt-out kettles, old stoves through the linings of which the flames had eaten and the rust had gnawed.  There were other hillocks and mountains with shadowy valleys between—­a mountain of waste paper, partly baled, partly stuffed into bursting bags of burlap, partly loose and scattered over the grimy floor; a hill of rags, all colours fading into sombre shadows....  And in the midst of these mountains and valleys of junk sat Great Taylor upon her dilapidated throne.