Pluris est oculatus testis unus quam auriti decem.
But, as always, the Most High remained silent, offering no testimony to the contrary.
This episode in the career of Stephanie Quest happened in the days of the Great Administration, an administration not great in the sense of material national prosperity, great only in spirit and in things of the mind and soul.
Even the carpenter, Albrecht Schmidt, across the hallway in the tenement, rose to the level of some unexplored spiritual stratum, for he had a wife and five children and only his wages, and he did not work every week.
"Nein," he said, when approached for contributions toward the funeral, "I haff no money for dead people. I don’t giff, I don’t lend. Vat it iss dot Shakespeare says? Don’t neffer borrow und don’t neffer lend noddings.... But I tell you what I do! I take dot leedle child!"
The slim, emaciated child, frightened white, had flattened herself against the dirty wall of the hallway to let the policemen and ambulance surgeon pass.
The trampling, staring inmates of the tenement crowded the stairs, a stench of cabbage and of gas possessed the place.
The carpenter’s wife, a string around her shapeless middle, and looking as though she might add to her progeny at any minute, came to the door of her two-room kennel.
"Poor little Stephanie," she said, "you come right in and make you’self at home along of us!"
And, as the child did not stir, seemingly frozen there against the stained and battered wall, the carpenter said:
"_Du_! Stephanie! Hey you, Steve! Come home und get you some breakfast right away quick!"
"Is that their kid?" inquired a policeman coming out of the place of death and wiping the sweat from his face.
"Well, you’ll have to fix that matter later——"
"I fix it now. I take dot little Steve for mine——"
The policeman yawned over the note book in which he was writing.
"It ain’t done that way, I’m tellin’ you! Well, all _right_! You can keep her until the thing is fixed up——" He went on writing.
The carpenter strode over to the child; his blond hair bristled, his beard was fearsome and like an ogre’s. But his voice trembled with Teuton sentiment.
"You got a new mamma, Steve!" he rumbled. "Now, you run in und cry mit her so much as you like." He pulled the little girl gently toward his rooms; the morbid crowd murmured on the stairs at the sight of the child of suicides.