Carroll then understood.  A gentleman who would have been presentable at the Waldorf-Astoria, at a gentleman’s area door applying for a position as coachman, was highly suspicious.  He understood readily how he would have looked at the matter had the cases been reversed.  He made his way out of the little yard, dodging the fluttering banners of servants’ clothes, and was conscious that his progress was anxiously watched by peering eyes at the windows.  He reflected that undoubtedly that house would be doubly bolted and barred that night, and he would not be surprised if a special policeman were summoned, in view of the great probability that he was a gentleman burglar spying out the land before he descended upon it in search of the spoons and diamonds.  Somehow the fancy tickled him to that extent that he felt almost as hysterical as a woman.  He laughed aloud, and two men whom he met just then turned round and looked at him suspiciously.

“Dopey, I guess,” one said, audibly, to the other.

It was now in Carroll’s mind to gain the Elevated as soon as possible, and hurry down-town to his ferry and catch his train.  He consulted his watch, and saw that he had just about time, if there were no delays.  As he replaced his watch he remembered that he had, besides his railroad book, very little money, only a little silver.  The helplessness of a cripple came over him.  He recalled seeing a man who had lost both his legs shuffling along on the sidewalk, with the stumps bound with leather, carrying a little tray of lead-pencils which nobody seemed to buy.  He felt like that cripple.  A man living to-day in the heart of civilization, where money is in reality legs and wings and hands, is nothing more than a torso without it, he thought.  He felt mutilated, unspeakably humiliated.  It seemed more out of his ability to get any honest employment than it had ever done before.  A number of laborers with their dinner-satchels, and their pickaxes over their shoulders, passed him.  They looked at him, as they passed, with gloomy hostility.  It was as if they accused him of having something which of a right belonged to them.  He fell to wondering how he would figure in their ranks.  He was no longer a very young man.  However, his muscles were still good and supple; it really seemed to him that he might dig or pick away at rocks, as he had seen men doing in that apparently aimless and hopeless and never-ending fashion.  He thought in such a case he should have to join the union, and he really wondered if they would admit him, if he pawned his clothes and should buy some poorer ones.  He decided, passing himself before himself in mental review, that he might be treated by the leaders of a labor union very much as he had just been treated by Mr. Baumstein at his area door.  He also decided that men like those who had just met him regard him with even worse suspicion and disfavor.  He remembered stories he had read of gentlemen, of students, voluntarily