that the wreckers were coming. The alley
was sold,--thirty dollars was all it brought,--and the old tenants moved
away, and were scattered to the four winds. Barney alone stayed. He
flatly refused to budge. They tore down the church next door and the
buildings on Houston Street, and filled what had been the yard, or
court, of the tenements with debris that reached halfway to the roof, so
that the old locksmith, if he wished to go out or in, must do so by way
of the third-story window, over a perilous path of shaky timbers and
sliding brick. He evidently considered it a kind of siege, and shut
himself in his attic, bolting and barring the door, and making secret
sorties by night for provisions. When the chimney fell down or was blown
over, he punched a hole in the rear wall and stuck the stovepipe through
that, where it blew defiance to the new houses springing up almost
within arm's-reach of it. It suggested guns pointing from a fort, and
perhaps it pleased the old man's soldier fancy. It certainly made smoke
enough in his room, where he was fighting his battles over with himself,
and occasionally with the janitor from the front, who climbed over the
pile of bricks and in through the window to bring him water. When I
visited him there one day, and, after giving the password, got behind
the bolted door, I found him, the room, and everything else absolutely
covered with soot, coal-black from roof to rafters. The password was
"Letter!" yelled out loud at the foot of the stairs. That would always
bring him out, in the belief that the government had finally sent him
the long-due money. Barney was stubbornly defiant, he would stand by his
guns to the end; but he was weakening physically under the combined
effect of short rations and nightly alarms. It was clear that he could
not stand it much longer.

The wreckers cut it short one morning by ripping off the roof over his
head before he was up. Then, and only then, did he retreat. His exit was
characterized by rather more haste than dignity. There had been a heavy
fall of snow overnight, and Barney slid down the jagged slope from his
window, dragging his trunk with him, in imminent peril of breaking his
aged bones. That day he disappeared from Mulberry Street. I thought he
was gone for good, and through the Grand Army of the Republic had set
inquiries on foot to find what had become of him, when one day I saw him
from my window, standing on the opposite side of the street, key