Then, too, there was Codman.  O’Day was always enthusiastic over Codman.  “I have taken a great fancy to that fishmonger, and a fine fellow he is,” he said one night to Kitty and John.  “His shop was shut when I first called on him, but he was good enough to open it at my knock, and I have just spent half an hour, and a very delightful half-hour, watching him handle the sea food, as he calls it, in his big refrigerator.  I got a look, too, at his chest and his arms, and at his pretty wife and children.  She is really the best type of the two.  American, you say, both of them, and a fine pair they are, and he tells me he pulled a surf-boat in your coast-guard when he was a lad of twenty, then took up fishing, and then went into Fulton Market, helping at a stall, and now he is up here with two delivery wagons and four assistants and is a member of a fish union, whatever that is.  It’s astonishing!  And yet I have met him many a time pushing his baby-carriage around the block.”

“Yes,” Kitty answered, putting on a shovel of coal, “and I’ll lay ye a wager, Mr. O’Day, that Polly Codman will be drivin’ through Central Park in her carriage before five years is out; and she deserves it, for there ain’t a finer woman from here to the Battery.”

“I am quite sure of it, Mistress Kitty.  That is where the American comes in—­or, perhaps it is the New Yorker.  I have not been here long enough to find out.”

Of all these neighbors, however, it was Timothy Kelsey, the hunchback, largely because of his misfortunes and especially because of his vivid contrast to all the others, who appealed to him most.  Tim, as has been said, kept the second-hand book-shop, half-way down the block on the opposite side of the street.  He was but a year or two older than O’Day, but you would never have supposed it had Tim not told you—­and not then unless you had looked close and followed the lines of care deep cut in his face and the wrinkles that crowded close to his deep, hollowed-out eyes.  When he was a boy of two, his sister, a girl of six, had let him drop to the sidewalk, and he had never since straightened his back.  The customary outlets by which fully equipped men earn their living having been denied Tim, he had passed his boyhood days in one of the small, down-town libraries cataloguing the books.  With this came the opportunity to attend the auction sales when some rare volume was to be bid for, he representing the library.  A small shop of his own followed in the lower part of the town, and then the one a little below Kling’s, where he lived alone with only a caretaker to look after his wants.

Kelsey had arrived one morning shortly after Felix had entered Kling’s service, carrying a heavily bound book which he laid on a glass case under Otto’s nose.  “Take a look at it, Otto,” he said, after pausing a moment to get his breath, the volume being heavy.  “There is more brass than leather on the outside, and more paint than text on the inside.  I have two others from the same collection.  It is in your line rather than in mine, I take it.  What do you think of it?  Could you sell it?”