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A man in his shirt sleeves sat by the little window. "Why father home so early?" she asked. "Yes lass, home early," he replied wearily. "I'm losing my place again." He had straggling gray hair, bleared eyes with an opaque, glazy look and a bluish cast of countenance. His chin was buried in the collar of his open shirt; his shoulders sagged, and he breathed heavily.

Pause to the shrill music of the street musician, hear the tuneless voice of the grimy troubadour of the alley-ways; and then hark to the one note that commands them all the call which lightens up faces sodden with base vices, eyes bleared with long looking into the dark caverns of crime: "Buy buy buy buy buy!" That is the tune the piper pipes. We would buy, and behold, we must pay.

One evening as the sun was setting, a man stood leaning against the fence along one of the streets of a certain city. His clothes were ragged, his hands and face unwashed, his hair uncombed and his eyes bleared; he looked more like a wild beast hunted and hungry, than a human being. It was Tom. The boys gathered about him, and made him the object of their fun and ridicule.

"Ah! then I missed making your acquaintance," I said, kindly, pitying the poor old fellow, as I noticed how his lips trembled, and how altogether broken he looked. "You knew the last count from childhood, then?" "I did, eccellenza!" And his bleared eyes roved over me with a sort of alarmed inquiry. "You loved him well?" I said, composedly, observing him with embarrassment.

The factitious ties of wealth, of place, of reputation, vanish from his bleared eyes; and the earnest heart, deep under all, craves only heartiness! The old craving of the office silence comes back, not with the proud wish only of being a protector, but of being protected.

The traveller stood looking from the tap-room window of the Cauliflower at the falling rain. The village street below was empty, and everything was quiet with the exception of the garrulous old man smoking with much enjoyment on the settle behind him. "It'll do a power o' good," said the ancient, craning his neck round the edge of the settle and turning a bleared eye on the window.

A hoarse crashing babble goes steadily on, forming the ground-bass of an odious symphony; shrill and discordant laughter rises by fits and starts above the low tumult; a coarse joke sets one group sniggering; a vile oath rings out from some foul-mouthed roysterer; and at intervals some flushed and bleared creature breaks into a slavering laugh which has a sickly resemblance to weeping.

The old crone through her bleared eyes peered curiously at the lady, as she replied to the maid, "Joab has gone forth, as he always goes at cockcrow, to lade his mule with leeks, and melons, and other vegetables and fruits. He will not be back till night-fall." Hadassah pressed her burning brow in thought, and then herself addressed the old woman.

An orchestra on a platform played rag-time music, while painted women in short dresses to give them a youthful appearance, sat on benches against the wall, or danced with swaggering men to the calls of a brawny bullet-headed floor manager. His bleared eyes and heavy swollen jaw showed the effects of a recent debauch ending in a fist fight.

He had known it once when the chance blow of an instructor had stretched him flat for thirty seconds. He could not keep Cheever off far enough to use his longer reach. He forgot everything but the determination to make ruins of that handsome face before he went out. He knocked loose one tooth and bleared an eye, but it was not enough.