At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, every door swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overalls flowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward the factory.  From the house before which the librarian of Middletown College sat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to the three mail-boxes:  one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, and grizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassive face and dark, smoldering eyes.  They stared at the woebegone old stranger before their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house was the last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowed factory.

J.M. gazed after them, shaking his head droopingly, until a second eruption from the house made him look back.  The cause of the hard-beaten bare ground of the yard was apparent at once, even to his inexperienced eyes.  The old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousand pores—­children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys and girls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who owned the loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed.  J.M. mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as high as seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of them twice, and left off.

A draggle-tailed woman stepped to a door and threw out a pan of dish-water.  J.M. resolved to overcome his squeamish disgust and make a few inquiries before he fled back to the blessed cleanliness and quiet of Middletown Library.  Picking his way gingerly through the chickens and puppies and cats and children, the last now smitten into astonished silence by his appearance, he knocked on the door.  The woman who came to answer him was dressed in what had been a black and purple percale, wrapper, she had a baby on her arm, and was making vain attempts to fasten up a great coil of hair at the back of her head.  No, she told him volubly, she couldn’t remember the town when it was any different, though she and Pat had lived there ever since they were married and came over from Ireland, and that was the whole of sixteen years ago.

“Oh!” with a sudden gush of sympathy, “and so it was your old home!  Isn’t that interring now!  You must come in and sit awhile.  Pat, git a chair for the gentleman, and Molly, take the baby so I can talk better.  Oh, won’t you come in?  You’d better, now, and have a bite to eat and a sup of tea.  I’ve some ready made.”  Of course, she went on, she knew the house didn’t look so nice as in his day....  “It’s all along of the children!  Irish people can’t kape so tidy, now, can they, with siven or eight, as Yankees can with one—­” But it certainly was a grand house, she didn’t wonder he came back to look at it.  Wasn’t it fairly like a palace, now, compared with anything her kin back in Ireland had, and such a fine big place for the children to play an’ all.