For the most part the legless man went about the business of begging among the business men of the city, since from the congested slum into which he disappeared at night it was no great feat for a man of his power to reach the more northern streets of that circle in whose midst the finances of the nation by turns simmer, boil, and boil over.  It was not unusual, during the noon-time rush of self-centred individuals, for the legless man to get himself stridden into and bowled clean over upon his face or back, since nothing is more loosening to purse-strings than the average man’s horror at having injured some creature already maimed; nor was it unusual for him at such times to scramble up smiling with a kind of invincible cheerfulness that more potently stirred the generosity of the man who had knocked him down than ever groans and complaints could have done.

If the weather was fine and conducive to bodily comfort, the beggar sometimes turned north and worked his way to Washington Square or the lower blocks of Fifth Avenue.  Sometimes, having agreed to pose for the head and trunk to some young art student, he left his hand-organ behind, and permitted himself the extravagance of riding in a surface car.  His boarding of a street-car was a feat of pure gymnastics, swift and virile; so, too, was his ascending or descending of a flight of steps, or the high platform on which he was to pose.  Incessant practice, added to natural skill and balance, enabled him to accomplish, without legs, feats which might have balked a man with a capable and energetic pair of them.  He could travel upon his crutches for the length of a city block almost as fast as the average man can run, and if it came 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: 

     BLIZZARD—­MFR. HATS