s, it was natural that he should fall to
watching the people on the cars. He got to studying faces. At first he
did it unconsciously, and he had probably been analyzing features idly
for years before he discovered and fully realized how extremely
interesting this occupation was becoming. One half holiday he went up to
the library and read a book on physiognomy, and after that he laid out
his course of study carefully, classifying and laying away in his memory
the various types of faces that he saw. He pursued his investigations in
the detached, careful spirit of the scientist, but as time passed he was
absorbingly interested. Every morning and every evening he worked in his
laboratory--the subway trains.

He never had to stand up in the cars, for he boarded them, whether at
one end of his trip or the other, before they were crowded; but as soon
as crowds began to fill up the aisles he always gave up his seat. This
naturally gained him repeated credit for courtesy, but the real reason
for his apparent gallantry was that he could not see people's faces when
he was sitting while others stood in the aisles. But when he hung to a
strap and looked at the window in front of him, the blackness outside
combined with the bright light of the car to make the glass of the
windows an excellent mirror to reflect the faces of those who stood near
him.

To classify faces according to nationality was not easy in the polyglot
crowds of this East Side line. But Mr. Neal devised many schemes to help
him. He watched the papers they read: everybody read papers! He even
ventured when greatly curious, to ask a question of the object of his
interest, so that the man might reveal his origin. Usually he was
rebuffed, but sometimes he was successful. He read all the books on
immigrants he could get his hands on. More than once he even followed a
rare specimen--shadowed him to his work and there made guarded
inquiries. Such investigations had several times made him late to work,
so that his chief had made sarcastic remarks. The chief clerk at Fields,
Jones & Houseman's was a tall, gaunt, old-young man with a hawk-like
nose that carried eyeglasses perched perilously astride it, and he had a
tongue that spit caustic. But the chief clerk's ugly words did not annoy
Mr. Neal if his inquiry had been successful.

At length he became so skillful that he could separate the Slavic types
into their various nationalities, and he could tell Polish, Lithuanian