me for what it lacked in range. Standing in the
circle of her friends, she would raise her head until her nose pointed
straight toward the sky, and pour forth her melody with a look of such
unutterable woe on her face that peals of laughter always wound up the
performance; whereupon Trilby would march off with an injured air, and
hide herself in one of the offices, refusing to come out. Poor Trilby!
with the passing away of the alley she seemed to lose her grip. She did
not understand it. After wandering about aimlessly for a while, vainly
seeking a home in the world, she finally moved over on the East Side
with one of the dispossessed tenants. But on all Sundays and holidays,
and once in a while in the middle of the week, she comes yet to inspect
the old block in Mulberry Street and to join in a quartette with old
friends.

[Illustration: Old Barney.]

Trilby and Old Barney were the two who stuck to the alley longest.
Barney was the star boarder. As everything about the place was misnamed,
the alley itself included, so was he. His real name was Michael, but the
children called him Barney, and the name stuck. When they were at odds,
as they usually were, they shouted "Barney Bluebeard!" after him, and
ran away and hid in trembling delight as he shook his key-ring at them,
and showed his teeth with the evil leer which he reserved specially for
them. It was reported in the alley that he was a woman-hater; hence the
name. Certain it is that he never would let one of the detested sex
cross the threshold of his attic room on any pretext. If he caught one
pointing for his aerie, he would block the way and bid her sternly
begone. She seldom tarried long, for Barney was not a pleasing object
when he was in an ugly mood. As the years passed, and cobweb and dirt
accumulated in his room, stories were told of fabulous wealth which he
had concealed in the chinks of the wall and in broken crocks; and as he
grew constantly shabbier and more crabbed, they were readily believed.
Barney carried his ring and filed keys all day, coining money, so the
reasoning ran, and spent none; so he must be hiding it away. The alley
hugged itself in the joyful sensation that it had a miser and his hoard
in the cockloft. Next to a ghost, for which the environment was too
matter-of-fact, that was the thing for an alley to have.

Curiously enough, the fact that, summer and winter, the old man never
missed early mass and always put a silver quarter--even