thrust one capable-looking hand deep into one of his pockets.  The fingers closed upon what they found there, like the meshes of a deep-sea net filled with its catch, and were slowly drawn to the surface.  The catch consisted of one-cent and five-cent pieces, representing the sales of his morning papers.  He counted the coins one by one over into the palm of the other hand, which then closed upon the total like another net, and dropped the treasure back into the deep sea of the other pocket.

His absorption in this process had been intense; his satisfaction with the result was complete.  Perhaps after every act of successful banking there takes place in the mind of man, spendthrift and miser, a momentary lull of energy, a kind of brief Pax vobiscum my soul and stomach, my twin masters of need and greed!  And possibly, as the lad deposited his earnings, he was old enough to enter a little way into this adult and despicable joy.  Be this as it may, he was not the next instant up again and busy.  He caught up his cap, dropped it not on his head but on one of his ragged knees; planted a sturdy hand on it and the other sturdy hand on the other knee; and with his sturdy legs swinging under the bench, toe kicking heel and heel kicking toe, he rested briefly from life’s battle.

The signs of battle were thick on him, unmistakable.  The palpable sign, the conqueror’s sign, was the profits won in the struggle of the streets.  The other signs may be set down as loss—­dirt and raggedness and disorder.  His hair might never have been straightened out with a comb; his hands were not politely mentionable; his coarse shoes, which seemed to have been bought with the agreement that they were never to wear out, were ill-conditioned with general dust and the special grime of melted pitch from the typical contractor’s cheapened asphalt; one of his stockings had a fresh rent and old rents enlarged their grievances.

A single sign of victory was better even than the money in the pocket—­the whole lad himself.  He was strongly built, frankly fashioned, with happy grayish eyes, which had in them some of the cold warrior blue of the sky that day; and they were set wide apart in a compact round head, which somehow suggested a bronze sphere on a column of triumph.  Altogether he belonged to that hillside of nature, himself a human growth budding out of wintry fortunes into life’s April, opening on the rocks hardy and all white.

But to sit there swinging his legs—­this did not suffice to satisfy his heart, did not enable him to celebrate his instincts; and suddenly from his thicket of forest trees and greening bushes he began to pour forth a thrilling little tide of song, with the native sweetness of some human linnet unaware of its transcendent gift.

Up the steep hill a man not yet of middle age had mounted from the flats.  He was on his way toward the parapet above.  He came on slowly, hat in hand, perspiration on his forehead; that climb from base to summit stretches a healthy walker and does him good.  At a turn of the road under the forest trees with shrubbery alongside he stopped suddenly, as a naturalist might pause with half-lifted foot beside a dense copse in which some unknown species of bird sang—­a young bird just finding its notes.