great gusts. "Will he brave
another winter?" I asked myself. "Iron blasts will sweep through the
passage; they will find him through the torn shirt and the poor grey
trousers, the torn waist-coat, the black jacket, and the threadbare
over-coat--someone's cast-off garment.... Now, he may have been born
blind, or he may have become blind; in any case he has been blind for
many years, and if he persist in living he will have to brave many
winters in that passage, for he is not an old man. What instinct
compels him to bear his dark life? Is he afraid to kill himself? Does
this fear spring from physical or from religious motives? Fear of hell?
Surely no other motive would enable him to endure his life."

In my intolerance for all life but my own I thought I could estimate
the value of the Great Mockery, and I asked myself angrily why he
persisted in living. I asked myself why I helped him to live. It would
be better that he should throw himself at once into the river. And this
was reason talking to me, and it told me that the most charitable act I
could do would be to help him over the parapet. But behind reason there
is instinct, and in obedience to an impulse, which I could not weigh or
appreciate, I went to the blind man and put some money into his hand;
the small coin slipped through his fingers; they were so cold that he
could not retain it, and I had to pick it from the ground.

"Thankee, sir. Can you tell, sir, what time it is?"

And this little question was my recompense. He and I wanted to know the
time. I asked him why he wanted to know the time, and he told me
because that evening a friend was coming to fetch him. And, wondering
who that friend might be, and, hoping he might tell me, I asked him
about his case of pencils, expressing a hope that he sold them. He
answered that he was doing a nice bit of trading.

"The boys about here are a trouble," he said, "but the policeman on the
beat is a friend of mine, and he watches them and makes them count the
pencils they take. The other day they robbed me, and he gave them such
a cuffing that I don't think they'll take my pencils again. You see,
sir, I keep the money I take for the pencils in the left pocket, and
the money that is given to me I keep in the right pocket. In this way I
know if my accounts are right when I make them up in the evening."

Now where, in what lonely room does he sit making up his accounts? but,
not wishing to seem inquisitorial, I turned th