This humanitarian song moves skillfully from a minor key to more complex tonality. On a stretch of pavement, a poor woman "tramp" walks with a babe in her arms and a child by her side; "their clothes were rags, their feet were bare." The piano plays a simple accompaniment on a minor chord. Her plight is ignored by a rich woman with a frozen stare. The music begins to drift into complex polytonality and increases in tension as the woman's circumstances become more detailed: "Out of friends, of sharers in a common human fate." But even hope can be found in this sad scene, as overheard music "points us to a better time ... a better time than ours." The text is by the British poet Matthew Arnold, and the song was one of the 114 songs Ives collected in 1921.

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