The boy Bog had now become, professionally, a creature of the night.  He was abroad at the, same hours as the burglars and garroters, and other owls and weasels of society.  Fink & Co. (Bog was the Co.) had secured the bill posting for three theatres and one negro-minstrel hall.  This they called their heavy business.  Carrying the huge damp placards, had already given to Bog’s shoulders a manifest tendency to roundness, which he was constantly trying to overcome by straightening up.  Fink, who was the veteran bill poster of the town, was as round shouldered as a hod carrier.  But Bog thought of somebody, and stood as nearly erect as he could.

The firm also obtained rather more than their share of ordinary bill posting, from doctors, drygoods dealers, and other people who find their profit in continually addressing the public from the summit of a dead wall, or the muddy level of the curbstones.  This they called their light business.  As it required neither strength nor practised dexterity of manipulation, the firm intrusted it to assistants.

There were a dozen of these, all stout, hulking young fellows nearly as old as Bog.  They took a fancy to bill posting, and worked industriously and faithfully at it, because it was nocturnal, mysterious, romantic.  The half dollar which they each received for a night’s labor, enabled them to lounge about the streets all day in glorious indolence.  Sometimes there was a prodigious rush of business, and then the firm were obliged to hire an extra force of boys.

Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his “New and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia,” Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street; small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway, Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand residences in the fashionable quarters of the town—­all in a single night.  This immense job took one hundred boys.

Bog had been in this partnership since the first of January.  It was now near the close of March.  The firm had been very successful.  Bog had comfortably supported himself and his aunt (whose rheumatism got worse in steady proportion as his business improved), and had invested more than two hundred and fifty dollars in a Wall-street savings bank.

With this money at his disposal, Bog might have thrown away the greasy cap and old coat and trowsers, spotted with paste, in which he pursued his occupation.  But when Bog was at his business, he was not above his business.  And he felt none the less attached to his old clothes because they were two inches too short in the legs and arms, and pinched him a little in all directions.