say, the lacemaker, or Laskar, or any of a thousand East Side
employers of labor. The man could be kind upon impulse, and generous. He
paid the highest wages. He supplied nourishing food at noon, and a
complete hour in which to discuss it. Furthermore, if a girl pleased
him, the work of her hands was subjected to less critical inspection,
and if she had any music in her, he invited her upstairs sometimes to
work the pedals of his grand piano, while his own powerful, hairy hands
rippled and thundered upon the keys. He was of a Godlike kindness when
his mind inclined to music, and the pedalling was skilful and sure. But
let the unfortunate crouched under the key-board, her trembling hands
taking the place of those feet which the master had lost, respond
stupidly to the signals conveyed to her shoulder by graduated pressures
from the stump of his right leg, and punishment of blows, pinchings, and
sarcasms was swift and sure.

The legless man was very much at home in his own house. He had inhabited
it for many years, and its arrangements were the expression of a
creature immensely able and ingenious, but maimed both in body
and soul.

The whole building, four stories tall, had once been a manufactory, but
Blizzard had subdivided its original lofts into pens, dens, passageways,
and rooms according to an elaborate plan of his own. And it was evident
to the most casual glance that expediency alone, untrammelled by any
consideration of purse, had been followed. Those walls, floors, and
ceilings, for instance, through which no sound of human origin, unaided
by mechanical device, could penetrate, must have cost a mint of money.
Nor could any man who depended for a living upon occasional pennies
dropped into a tin cup have got together so extensive a collection of
books upon scientific subjects, many of them handsomely bound and
printed in foreign countries. Works upon explosives, tunnelling,
electricity, and music were especially abundant, not only in English,
but in German. And there were books upon the organization of armies, and
upon the chemistry of precious stones. A cursory examination of his
books would have found the master of the house to be interested also in
obstetrics, in poisons, and in anesthesia; but of romance, humanity, or
poetry his library had but a single example, the "Monte Cristo" of the
elder Dumas.

Had all the doors and windows of the house been thrown open, and all its
inhabitants expelled, so that yo