in either hand he stared at the crumbling headstones of those guardsmen of Mammon who once walked the earth and fought their heart battles, as he was walking and fighting, but who now knew no ten o’clock, no three, who looked upon the stock-gamblers and dollar-trailers as they looked upon the worms that honeycombed their headstones’ bases.  What thoughts went through Bob Brownley’s mind only his Maker knew.  For minutes he stood motionless, then he walked on down Broadway.  He went into the Battery.  The benches were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York’s mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise:  Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose frankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes spelt, “from the farm and mother’s watchful love.”  On another bench an Italian woman who had a half-dozen future dollar kings and social queens about her, and whose clothes told of the immigrant ship just into port.  Bob Brownley apparently saw none.  But suddenly he stopped.  Upon a bench sat a sweet-faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy woods of dreamland.  The woman’s face was one of those that blend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood.  ’Twas a pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by the iron of the city.

“Mr. Brownley—­” She started to rise.

He gently pushed her back with a “hush,” unwilling to rob the sleepers of their heaven.

“What are you doing here, Mrs.——?” He halted.

“Mrs. Chase.  Mr. Brownley, when I went away from Randolph & Randolph’s office I married John Chase; you may remember him as delivery clerk.  I had such a happy home and my husband was so good; I did not have to typewrite any longer.  These are our two children.”

“What are you doing here?”

The tears sprang to her eyes; she dropped them, but did not answer.

“Don’t mind me, woman.  I, too, have hidden hells I don’t want the world to see.  Don’t mind me; tell me your story.  It may do you good; it may do me good; yes, it may do me good.”

I had dropped into a seat a few feet away.  Both were too much occupied with their own thoughts to notice me or any one else.  I could not overhear their conversation, but long afterward, when I mentioned our old stenographer, Bessie Brown, to Bob, he told me of the incident at the Battery.  Her husband, after their marriage, had become infected with the stock-gambling microbe, the microbe that gnaws into its victim’s mind and heart day and night, while ever fiercer grows the “get rich, get rich” fever.  He had plunged with their savings and had drawn a blank.  He had lost his position in disgrace and had landed in the bucket-shop, the sub-cellar pit of the big Stock Exchange hell.  From there