eat engine with steam up. His feet tapped with the
regularity of clock-ticks over mile after mile of the city walks. He
longed for physical weariness, for sleep; but the day, with its manifold
mental exaltations and depressions, prevented. It seemed to him that he
could never sleep again, could never again be weary. He could only walk
on and on.

Down town again, he found the crowds smaller and the border of chairs in
front of his hotel largely empty. A few cigars still burned in the
half-light, but they were the last flicker of a conflagration now all
but extinguished. The restless throb of the human dynamo was lower and
more subdued. The street cars were practically empty. Instead of a
constant stream of vehicles, an occasional cab clattered past. The city
was preparing for its brief hours of fitful rest.

Straight on Ben walked, between the towering office buildings, beside
the now darkened department-store hives, past the giant wholesale
establishments and warehouses; until, quite unintentionally on his part,
and almost before he realized it, he found himself in another world,
another city, as distinct as though it were no part of the cosmopolitan
whole. Again he came upon throbbing life; but of quite another type.
Once more he met people in abundance, noisy, chattering human beings;
but more frequently than his own he now heard foreign tongues that he
did not understand, and did not even recognize. No longer were the
pedestrians well dressed or apparently prosperous. Instead, poverty and
squalor and filth were rampant. More loth even than the well-to-do of
the suburbs to go within doors, the swarming mass of humanity covered
the steps of the houses, and overflowed upon the sidewalk, even upon the
street itself. There were men, women, children; the lame, the halt, the
blind. The elders stared at the visitor, while the youngsters, secure
in numbers, guyed him to their hearts' content.

It was all as foreign to any previous experience of this countryman as
though he had come from a different planet. He had read of the city
slums as of Stanley's Central African negro tribes with unpronounceable
names; and he had thought of them in much the same way. To him they had
been something known to exist, but with which it was but remotely
probable he would ever come in contact. Now, without preparation or
premeditation, thrown face to face with the reality, it brought upon him
a sickening feeling, a sort of mental nausea. Ben