'Royster drew a more resonant breath, long, deep and mellow.

"He sleep!" cried Bludoffski, in scornful fury. "Der tog! He sleep ven I
tell him--"

He sprang up, ran across the room and returned with a huge
carving-knife. "I vill kill him!" he cried, and, indeed, made start to
do it. But as suddenly he checked himself, tossed the knife on the
floor, muttering, "Bah, he not fit to kill," and opened the door into
the saloon. The Anarchist meeting had ended, but several persons were
still sitting around the tables, drinking beer. He called to two of
these, and said, in a tone of almost pitiful despair:

"Take dot man home. I not know who he vas. I not know vere he lif.
Somebotty fin' oud. Look his pockets insite. Ask der boleecemans. Do any
dings, but take him avay. He haf no soul, no mind, no heart, no
noddings!"

IV.

MAGGIE.

Wrapped in contemplation and but little else, probably because his stock
of contemplation largely exceeded his stock of else, Mr. Dootleby
wandered down the Bowery. Midnight sounded out from the spire in St.
Mark's Church just as Mr. Dootleby, having come from Broadway through
Astor Place, turned about at the Cooper Union.

There was a touch of melancholy in Mr. Dootleby's expression as he
looked down the big, brilliant Bowery, glowing with the light of a
hundred electric burners and myriads of gas-jets, and seething with
unnatural activity. He stopped a moment in the shadow thrown by the
booth of a coffee and cake vender, and looked attentively into the faces
of the throngs that passed him. He seemed to be thinking hard.

[Illustration: MR. DOOTLEBY.]

In truth, it is a suggestive place, is the Bowery. Day and night are all
the same to it. It never gets up and it never goes to bed. It never
takes a holiday. It never keeps Lent. It indulges in no sentiments. It
acknowl-edges no authority that bids it remember the Sabbath Day to
keep it holy. But from year's end to year's end it bubbles, and boils,
and seethes, and frets while the daylight lasts, and in the glare of its
brighter night it plunges headlong into carousal!

Mr. Dootleby had a great habit of walking at night, though he seldom
came down town so far as this. His apartments were in Harlem, and
usually, after he had taken his dinner and played a rubber of whist, he
found himself sufficiently exercised by a stroll as far as Forty-second
Street. But to-night he felt a trifle restless, and journeyed on.

Though his hair wa