at the refusal; and
creditor and debtor parted with mutual good wishes.

CHAPTER III.

LOVING AFAR OFF.

The boy Bog had now become, professionally, a creature of the night. He
was abroad at the, same hours as the burglars and garroters, and other
owls and weasels of society. Fink & Co. (Bog was the Co.) had secured
the bill posting for three theatres and one negro-minstrel hall. This
they called their heavy business. Carrying the huge damp placards, had
already given to Bog's shoulders a manifest tendency to roundness, which
he was constantly trying to overcome by straightening up. Fink, who was
the veteran bill poster of the town, was as round shouldered as a hod
carrier. But Bog thought of somebody, and stood as nearly erect as
he could.

The firm also obtained rather more than their share of ordinary bill
posting, from doctors, drygoods dealers, and other people who find their
profit in continually addressing the public from the summit of a dead
wall, or the muddy level of the curbstones. This they called their light
business. As it required neither strength nor practised dexterity of
manipulation, the firm intrusted it to assistants.

There were a dozen of these, all stout, hulking young fellows nearly as
old as Bog. They took a fancy to bill posting, and worked industriously
and faithfully at it, because it was nocturnal, mysterious, romantic.
The half dollar which they each received for a night's labor, enabled
them to lounge about the streets all day in glorious indolence.
Sometimes there was a prodigious rush of business, and then the firm
were obliged to hire an extra force of boys.

Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his "New
and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia," Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large
as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street;
small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway,
Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing
cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand
residences in the fashionable quarters of the town--all in a single
night. This immense job took one hundred boys.

Bog had been in this partnership since the first of January. It was now
near the close of March. The firm had been very successful. Bog had
comfortably supported himself and his aunt (whose rheumatism got worse
in st