ave any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's young brain once
in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy had not been trained
to think; what training the boys picked up in the alley didn't run much
to deep thinking.

Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as the other men did
once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of them
who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from under
the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if it had
killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there
was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill
for him that very day twice?

Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
awning, the sun came over the house-tops and looked down for an hour or
two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
upon unnumbered ash-barrels. A stray cabbage-leaf in one of these was
the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.

Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up a
real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him of.
The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man scraped it
off and put whitewash on the wall. As if everything that made fun for a
boy was bad.

Down the street a little way was a yard just big enough and nice to play
ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no boys and
no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop" would have
none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at it and
"given them the collar." They had been up before the judge, and th