k without taking it out of you and the boy."

Her head dropped for a second at mention of the boy, but it was soon
lifted.

"Let's get away from them," she gasped. "Let's go where there are no
neighbors."

"Would you?" I asked.

"I'd go to the ends of the earth with you, Billy," she answered
quietly.

How plucky she was! I couldn't help but smile as I answered, more to
myself:

"We haven't even the carfare to go to the ends of the earth, Ruth. It
will take all we have to pay our bills."

"All we have?" she asked.

No, not that. They could get only a little of what she and I had. They
could take our belongings, that's all. And they hadn't got those yet.

But I had begun to hate those neighbors with a fierce, unreasoning
hatred. In silence they dictated, without assisting. For a dozen years
I had lived with them, played with them, been an integral part of
their lives, and now they were worse than useless to me. There wasn't
one of them big enough to receive me into his home for myself alone,
apart from the work I did. There wasn't a true brother among them.

Our lives turn upon little things. They turn swiftly. Within fifteen
minutes I had solved my problem in a fashion as unexpected as it was
radical.

CHAPTER IV

WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA

Going down the path to town bitterly and blindly, I met Murphy. He was
a man with not a gray hair in his head who was a sort of
man-of-all-work for the neighborhood. He took care of my furnace and
fussed about the grounds when I was tied up at the office with night
work. He stopped me with rather a shamefaced air.

"Beg pardon, sor," he began, "but I've got a bill comin' due on the
new house--"

I remembered that I owed him some fifteen dollars. I had in my pocket
just ten cents over my carfare. But what arrested my attention was the
mention of a new house.

"You mean to tell me that you're putting up a house?"

"The bit of a rint, sor, in ---- Street."

The contrast was dramatic. The man who emptied my ashes was erecting
tenements and I was looking for work that would bring me in food. My
people had lived in this country some two hundred years or more, and
Murphy had probably not been here over thirty. There was something
wrong about this, but I seemed to be getting hold of an idea.

"How old are you, Murphy?" I asked.

"Goin' on sixty, sor."

"You came to America broke?"

"Dead broke, sor."

"You have a wife and children?"

"A woman and six ch