ut of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For
thirteen days out of each fortnight his father was a steady,
hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His
mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son
should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack
dentist and after a fashion, learned the business.

"Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his
mother's death; she had left him some money--not much, but
enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from
the charlatan and had opened his 'Dental Parlors' on Polk
street, an 'accommodation street' of small shops in the
residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected
a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car
conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk street
called him the 'doctor' and spoke of his enormous strength.
For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of
blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving
his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly,
ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with
a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as hard as wooden
mallets, strong as vices, the hands of the old-time car boy.
Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory
tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut,
angular; the jaw salient: like that of the carnivora.

"But for one thing McTeague would have been perfectly
contented. Just outside his window was his signboard--a
modest affair--that read: 'Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors.
Gas Given;' but that was all. It was his ambition, his
dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge
gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something
gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, but as
yet it was far beyond his means."

Then Mr. Norris launches into a description of the street in which
"McTeague" lives. He presents that street as it is on Sunday, as it
is on working days; as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are
going out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock
when the women are out purchasing from the small shopkeepers, as it
is at night when the shop girls are out with the soda-fountain
tenders and the motor cars dash by full of