iled
him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and
certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a
blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily
pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the
yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and
crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash.
From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered that
three families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too large
for his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and read
the names shudderingly--Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S.
Petrofsky.

"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him,
and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the other
end of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemed
to vibrate about him in hot waves.

At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, every
door swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overalls
flowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward the
factory. From the house before which the librarian of Middletown College
sat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to the
three mail-boxes: one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, and
grizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassive
face and dark, smoldering eyes. They stared at the woebegone old stranger
before their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house was
the last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowed
factory.

J.M. gazed after them, shaking his head droopingly, until a second
eruption from the house made him look back. The cause of the hard-beaten
bare ground of the yard was apparent at once, even to his inexperienced
eyes. The old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousand
pores--children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys and
girls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who owned
the loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed.
J.M. mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as high
as seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of them twice, and left
off.

A draggle-tailed woman stepped to a door and threw out a pan of
dish-water. J.M. resolved to o