to climbing a rope or a rain-duct he was more ape than human. In his own dwelling he had for his own use, instead of the laborious stairs needed by its other inmates, a system of knotted ropes by which he could ascend from cellar to attic, and polished poles by whose aid he could accomplish the most lightning-like descending slides.

Marrow Lane, shaped like a dog's hind leg, is one of those crooked and narrow thoroughfares which the approaches and anchorings of the Brooklyn Bridge have cast into gloom and darkness. There are spots upon which the sun will not shine again until the great bridge has perished; there are corners in which drafts strong as a heaven-born wind whistle from one year's end to the other. There are thousands of children in the region, and in the more purely tenement settlements to the north, who have yet to see a green field or to handle a flower.

At the very crook of the dog's leg, on the north side of Marrow Lane, a narrow door, half glazed and sometimes burnished by the sun, has printed across it in dingy gilt letters:

CONTENTS

Once the door with the faded gilt letters had closed, with him inside, the legless man, who was none other than Blizzard, the manufacturer of hats, put off those airs of helplessness and humility by which so many coins were attracted into the little tin cup upon the top of his hand-organ, and assumed the attitude of one accustomed to command and to be served, to reward and to punish. He was no longer a beggar, but a magnate. He swelled with power, and twenty girls of almost as many nationalities, plaiting straw hats by the gas-light, cringed in their hearts, and redoubled the speed of their hands. About the twenty girls who slaved for Blizzard there were two peculiarities which at once distinguished them from any other collection of female factory-hands on the East Side. They were all strong and healthy looking, and they were all pretty. He had collected them much as rich men in a higher station of life collect paintings or pearls. If some of them bore the marks of blows and pinchings, it was not upon any part of them which showed. If some of them suffered from the fear of torture or even sudden death, it did not prevent them from showing the master rows of even white teeth between ingratiatingly parted lips whenever he deigned to speak to them. If any girl among them thought to escape him, to find work elsewhere, to betray what she knew of him, even, and vanish into the slums of some far city, she was deterred by the memory of certain anecdotes constantly related by her companions. The most terrible of 

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