ir superiority. Their numbers gave character to the street, and
rendered not them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that
March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church,
built long before their incursion was dreamed of. It seemed to have come
to them there, and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down
from its facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something
propitiatory, almost deprecatory. It was a fancy, of course; the street
was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming
and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared,
pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor
over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones. She lay
with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation; but
the indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her
case. She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their
games, and ran gayly trooping after her; even the young fellow and young
girl exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of
a liquor store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she
passed. March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the
worst conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when
he reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which
daily occur to entertain them in such streets. A small town could rarely
offer anything comparable to it, and the country never. He said that
if life appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that
neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,
its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance
somewhere.

But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place? It could
not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked
round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his
neglect of his old friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap a
lodging in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some
amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he
turned into from Mott.

A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he
pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of
rusty crape dangled. But