le.

Once he brought home a plaster-of-Paris Venus--the Melos one with the
beautiful arch to her torso of a bow that instant after the arrow has
flown. Hanscha cuffed him for the expenditure, but secretly her old
heart, which since childhood had subjected her to strange, rather
epileptical, sinking spells, and had induced the drinking, warmed her
with pride in his choice.

Hanscha, with her veiny nose and the dreadful single hair growing out of
a mole on her chin, was not without her erudition. She had read for the
midwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.

She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coin
into the gas meter. Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the
Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a
quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he had
also found a _Les Miserables_ and _The Confessions of St. Augustine_,
which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the
ash pit.

Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained old
volume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that it
wound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply and
stinging his eyes to tears:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting!
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy;
The youth who daily farther, from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

But Hanscha was drunk and threw some coffee-sopped bread at him, and so
his foray into poetry ended in the slops of disgust.

A Miss Manners, a society social worker who taught poverty
sweet forbearance every Tuesday from four until six, wore a
forty-eight-diamond bar pin on her under bodice (on Tuesday from
four until six), and whose gray-suede slippers were ever so slightly
blackened from the tripping trip from front door to motor and back, took
him up, as the saying is, and for two weeks Jas