I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story.  Evidently I must account for my Sundays!  It was with the bird now that Mrs. Brown continued her conversation.  He was a Rip Van Winkle in plumage.  His claws trailed over the sand of the cage.  Except when Mrs. Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing in her part of the tenement.

“I’ve had him twenty-five years,” she said to me.  “Brown give him to me.  I guess I’d miss him if he died.”  And presently she repeated again:  “I don’t believe I even know how much I’d miss him.”

On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood’s, whose Friday fish dinner had poisoned me.  My hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours’ work.  My back was turned to the door, which I knew must be open, as I felt a cold wind.  The lake brought capricious changes of the temperature:  the thermometer had fallen the night before from seventy to thirty.  I turned to see who the newcomer might be.  The sight of him set my heart beating faster.  The restaurant keeper was questioning the man to find out who he was....  He was evidently nobody—­a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into debris upon the edge of a city’s vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for himself; the type par excellence who has worn out charity organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there were none of it left in the world.  He was asking for food.  The proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him away.  He pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed, letting in a fresh gale of icy air.  The man was gone.  I turned back to my supper.  Scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him.  But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I knew it.  I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him.  He had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail’s pace, and he was startled when I came up to him.  One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident.  They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed all his feelings.  Across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar, pale like the rest of his face.  He was small and had sandy hair.  The directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air over his scraggly red beard.

Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was visible.