many years that we have got to know, at
least by sight, a great many of the dwellers thereabouts. We are almost
in the very heart of that "mob" on whose "fellow-feeling of vulgarity"
the fellows who grind the organ rely to sustain them in their outrageous
behavior. And, do you know, as we look out of those windows, year after
year, we find ourselves growing to have a fellow-feeling of vulgarity
with that same mob.

[Illustration]

The figure and form which we know best are those of old Judge
Phoenix--for so the office-jester named him when we first moved in,
and we have known him by that name ever since. He is a fat old Irishman,
with a clean-shaven face, who stands summer and winter in the side
doorway that opens, next to the little grocery opposite, on the
alley-way to the rear tenement. Summer and winter he is buttoned to his
chin in a faded old black overcoat. Alone he stands for the most part,
smoking his black pipe and teetering gently from one foot to the other.
But sometimes a woman with a shawl over her head comes out of the
alley-way and exchanges a few words with him before she goes to the
little grocery to get a loaf of bread, or a half-pint of milk, or to
make that favorite purchase of the poor--three potatoes, one turnip,
one carrot, four onions, and the handful of kale--a "b'ilin'." And
there is also another old man, a small and bent old man, who has some
strange job that occupies odd hours of the day, who stops on his way to
and from work to talk with the Judge. For hours and hours they talk
together, till one wonders how in the course of years they have not come
to talk themselves out. What can they have left to talk about? If they
had been Mezzofanti and Macaulay, talking in all known languages on all
known topics, they ought certainly to have exhausted the resources of
conversation long before this time.

Judge Phoenix must be a man of independent fortune, for he toils not,
neither does he spin, and the lilies of the field could not lead a more
simple vegetable life, nor stay more contentedly in one place. Perhaps
he owns the rear tenement. I suspect so, for he must have been at one
time in the labor-contract business. This, of course, is a mere guess,
founded upon the fact that we once found the Judge away from his post
and at work. It was at the time they were repaving Broadway with the
great pavement. We discovered the Judge at the corner of Bleecker Street
perched on a pile of dirt, doing duty