s, and curled, dirty and
unshorn, around his ears and the nape of his neck. His face was covered
with a stubble of four days' growth, his body with rags--a coat; a
shirt, the button long since gone at the neck; and trousers gaping in
wide rents at the knees, and torn at the ankles where they flapped
around miss-mated socks and shoes.

A hundred, two hundred people passed him in a block, the populace of the
Bowery awakening into fullest life at midnight, men, women and
children--the dregs of the city's scum--the aristocracy of upper Fifth
Avenue, of Riverside Drive, aping Bohemianism, seeking the lure of the
Turkey Trot, transported from the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Rich
and poor, squalor and affluence, vice and near-vice surged by him,
voicing their different interests with laughter and sobs and soft words
and blasphemy, and, in a sort of mocking chorus, the composite effect
rose and fell in pitiful, jangling discords.

Few gave him heed--and these few but a cursory, callous glance. The
Flopper, on the inside of the sidewalk, in the shadow of the buildings,
gave as little as he got, though his eyes were fastened sharply, now
ahead, now, screwing around his body to look behind him, on the faces of
the pedestrians as they passed; or, rather, he appeared to look through
and beyond those in his immediate vicinity to the ones that followed in
his rear from further down the street, or approached him from the next
corner.

Suddenly the Flopper shrank into a doorway. From amidst the crowd
behind, the yellow flare of a gasoline lamp, outhanging from a
secondhand shop, glinted on brass buttons. An officer, leisurely
accommodating his pace to his own monarchial pleasure, causing his
hurrying fellow occupants of the pavement to break and circle around
him, sauntered casually by. The Flopper's black eyes contracted with
hate and a scowl settled on his face, as he watched the policeman pass;
then, as the other was lost again in the crowd ahead, he once more
resumed his progress down the block.

The Flopper crossed the intersecting street, his leg trailing a
helpless, sinuous path on its not over-clean surface, and started along
the next block. Halfway down was a garishly lighted establishment. When
near this the Flopper began to hurry desperately, as from further along
the street again his ear caught the peculiar raucous note of an
automobile horn accompanied by the rumbling approach of a heavy motor
vehicle. He edged his