d. A noise in the next
room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake.
He grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted
upon the intervening door.

He heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him.
"Jimmie! Jimmie! Are yehs dere?" it whispered. The urchin started.
The thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of
the other room. She crept to him across the floor.

The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep. The
mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in
the agonies of strangulation. Out at the window a florid moon was
peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river
glimmered pallidly.

The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering. Her features were
haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. She grasped the
urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a
corner. The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the
woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends
would come from below.

They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window,
drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving
body of the mother.

Chapter IV

The babe, Tommie, died. He went away in a white, insignificant coffin,
his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had
stolen from an Italian.

She and Jimmie lived.

The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early
age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years
without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic. He
studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he
thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a respect for
the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.

He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a
mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." While they
got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated
they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners were impatient over the
pictured depths of their degradation. They were waiting for
soup-tickets.

A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the
portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his
hearers.

"You are damned," said the preacher. And the reader of sounds might
ha