ious message.

Later he found himself passing a side street and looked up it. It was
so narrow, and on either side of it were such old, tall, and
sloping-walled houses that it attracted his attention. It looked as if
a bit of old London had been left to stand while newer places grew up
and hid it from view. This was the kind of street he liked to pass
through for curiosity's sake. He knew many of them in the old quarters
of many cities. He had lived in some of them. He could find his way
home from the other end of it. Another thing than its queerness
attracted him. He heard a clamor of boys' voices, and he wanted to see
what they were doing. Sometimes, when he had reached a new place and
had had that lonely feeling, he had followed some boyish clamor of play
or wrangling, and had found a temporary friend or so.

Half-way to the street's end there was an arched brick passage. The
sound of the voices came from there--one of them high, and thinner and
shriller than the rest. Marco tramped up to the arch and looked down
through the passage. It opened on to a gray flagged space, shut in by
the railings of a black, deserted, and ancient graveyard behind a
venerable church which turned its face toward some other street. The
boys were not playing, but listening to one of their number who was
reading to them from a newspaper.

Marco walked down the passage and listened also, standing in the dark
arched outlet at its end and watching the boy who read. He was a
strange little creature with a big forehead, and deep eyes which were
curiously sharp. But this was not all. He had a hunch back, his legs
seemed small and crooked. He sat with them crossed before him on a
rough wooden platform set on low wheels, on which he evidently pushed
himself about. Near him were a number of sticks stacked together as if
they were rifles. One of the first things that Marco noticed was that
he had a savage little face marked with lines as if he had been angry
all his life.

"Hold your tongues, you fools!" he shrilled out to some boys who
interrupted him. "Don't you want to know anything, you ignorant swine?"

He was as ill-dressed as the rest of them, but he did not speak in the
Cockney dialect. If he was of the riffraff of the streets, as his
companions were, he was somehow different.

Then he, by chance, saw Marco, who was standing in the arched end of
the passage.

"What are you doing there listening?" he shouted, and at