wo persons of very different
appearance and nature came out of two houses of very different
appearance and nature at precisely the same moment, and started to move
toward each other by methods of locomotion no less different than were
the appearances of the respective persons or the respective houses from
which they emerged.

The house from which the one issued was of speckless white marble, and
looked from the advantageous corner of Sixty-something Street and Fifth
Avenue upon the purple and white lilacs and the engaging spring greens
of Central Park.

The other came out of a dark house at the angle of a narrow street in
the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, whose door, crossed by dingy gilt
lettering, violently clanged a bell at opening and closing. The first
person stepped with the long clean strides of youth and liberty. The
second person cannot be said to have stepped at all. The first person,
meeting a policeman, smiled and said: "Good morning, Kelly." The second,
similarly meeting with an officer of the law, scowled upward, and said:
"Do it again, and I'll break you." The first person came out of the
uptown palace like a fairy from a grotto; the second emerged from the
downtown rookery like some prehistoric monster from a cave.

At a distance you might have mistaken him for an electrician or a
sewer-expert coming into view through one of those round holes in the
sidewalk by which access is provided to the subterranean apparatus of
cities. But, drawing nearer, you perceived that he was but half a man,
who stood upon the six-inch stubs of what had once been a pair of legs.
But what nature could do for what was left of him nature had done. He
had the neck, the arms, and the torso of a Hercules. His coat, black,
threadbare, shining, and unpleasantly spotted, seemed on the point of
giving way here and there to a system of restless and enormous muscles.
But that these should serve no better purpose than ceaselessly to turn
the handle of an unusually diminutive and tuneless street-organ might
have roused in the observer's mind doubts as to the wisdom and vigilance
of that divine providence which is so much better understood and trusted
by the healthy and fortunate than by the wretched, the maimed, and
the diseased.

For the most part the legless man went about the business of begging
among the business men of the city, since from the congested slum into
which he disappeared at night it was no great feat for a man of his
p