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More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked, rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath elevated trains, where men, burned down to the butt end of soiled lives, pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors a veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves.

Then striking east once more, making a detour to avoid the Bowery, he ran on at top speed again. To reach the Sanctuary, not before the Magpie should have spread the alarm, that was impossible, but to reach it before the underworld should have had time to recover its breath, as it were, before the underworld should have had time to act that was his only chance!

"Fred, show the King of America where his royal impedimenta await his royal pleasure," Lawrence directed a young man with the manners of a Bowery boy, who appeared in answer to his summons. With him Edestone went down to the trunks and took from one of them a small receiving instrument with a dial attachment similar to the one on top of the Deionizer, which he had dropped into the Channel.

Now and then, too, he would let fall some word or expression which would betray greater familiarity with the ins and outs of the city than with the intricacies of the forest. "It was fixed up in a glass case like one Abe Condit used to have in his place in the Bowery," he said once in describing a prize trout some city fisherman had stuffed and framed.

On their way to the hall on the Bowery Gerrit Smith and John Brown passed through dimly lighted streets along which were drifting scores of boys and girls, ragged, friendless, homeless, shelterless in the chill night. The strange old man's eyes were fixed on space. He saw nothing, heard nothing of the city's roaring life or the call of its fathomless misery.

They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse" vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides from the hamlets of the Kennebec. We declare for the prolétaires. We vote the working-words ticket.

It is early spring, we will suppose; and being in the Bowery, we find the streets in its vicinity reeking with putrid matter, hurling pestilence into the dark dwellings of the unknown poor, and making thankful the coffin-maker, who in turn thanks a nonundertaking corporation for the rich harvest.

The thermometer had risen twenty-five degrees during the night a great change, but not unusual in our variable climate. Phil rather enjoyed this walk, notwithstanding his back was a little lame. He walked up the Bowery to the point where Third and Fourth avenues converge into it.

He turned a corner somewhere, thinking to walk around the block and find his way back into the Bowery. But the more corners he rounded the more he found ever at his elbow, and the conviction began to make its way into his mind that he had lost his bearings.

He was, however, able to defend himself, and prove to the directors that he had done his best. Then he returned to America and spent the rest of his life quietly on his farm, or "bowery" as it was called in Dutch.