city had ever
known. Tig used up all their savings to bury her, and the next week, by
some peculiar fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor of
his paper, and was discharged. This sank deep into his sensitive
soul, and he swore he would be an underling no longer--which foolish
resolution was directly traceable to his hair, the color of which, it
will be recollected, was red.

Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into something
else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming a
novelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on
a battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned
something to keep him in food. The environment was calculated to further
impress him with the idea of his genius.

A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and Tig
wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations,
and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honore;
Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and
dramatic force,--Tig's own words,--and mailed the same. He was convinced
he would get the prize. He was just as much convinced of it as Nora
Finnegan would have been if she had been with him.

So he went about doing more fiction, taking no especial care of himself,
and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for the weather,
permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.

He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemned
and rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come in
twice a day and keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged ten, and
looked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but somewhere inside
his bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion. He found fuel for
the cracked stove, somehow or other. He brought it in a dirty sack which
he carried on his back, and he kept warmth in Tig's miserable body.
Moreover, he found food of a sort--cold, horrible bits often, and Tig
wept when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him.

Tig was getting better, though he was conscious of a weak heart and a
lamenting stomach, when, to his amazement, the Sparrow ceased to visit
him. Not for a moment did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that only
something in the nature of an act of Providence, as the insurance
companies would designate it, could keep the little bundle of bones away
from him. As the days went by,