On this the eve of his thirty-second birthday and likewise the tenth anniversary of his servitude, the appearance of P. Sybarite was elaborately normal—­varying, as it did, but slightly from one year’s-end to the other.

His occupation had fitted his head and shoulders with a deceptive but none the less perennial stoop.  His means had endowed him with a single outworn suit of ready-made clothing which, shrinking sensitively on each successive application of the tailor’s sizzling goose, had come to disclose his person with disconcerting candour—­sleeves too short, trousers at once too short and too narrow, waistcoat buttons straining over his chest, coat buttons refusing to recognise a buttonhole save that at the waist.  Circumstances these that added measurably to his apparent age, lending him the semblance of maturity attained while still in the shell of youth.

The ruddy brown hair thatching his well-modelled head, his sanguine colouring, friendly blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage; and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore out the suggestion with an added hint of gentle blood.

But whatever his antecedents, the fact is indisputable that P. Sybarite, just then, was most miserable, and not without cause; for the Genius of the Place held his soul in Its melancholy bondage.

The Place was the counting-room in the warehouse of Messrs. Whigham & Wimper, Hides & Skins; and the Genius of it was the reek of hides both raw and dressed—­an effluvium incomparable, a passionate individualist of an odour, as rich as the imagination of an editor of Sunday supplements, as rare as a reticent author, as friendly as a stray puppy.

For ten endless years the body and soul of P. Sybarite had been thrall to that Smell; for a complete decade he had inhaled it continuously nine hours each day, six days each week—­and had felt lonesome without it on every seventh day.

But to-day all his being was in revolt, bitterly, hopelessly mutinous against this evil and overbearing Genius....

The warehouse—­impregnable lair of the Smell, from which it leered smug defiance at the sea-sweet atmosphere of the lower city—­occupied a walled-in arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, fronting on Frankfort Street, in that part of Town still known to elder inhabitants as “the Swamp.”  Above rumbled the everlasting inter-borough traffic; to the right, on rising ground, were haunts of roaring type-mills grinding an endless grist of news; to the left, through a sudden dip and down a long decline, a world of sober-sided warehouses, degenerating into slums, circumscribed by sleepy South Street; all, this afternoon, warm and languorous in the lazy breeze of a sunny April Saturday.