The babe, Tommie, died. He went away in a white,insignificant coffin, his small waxen hand clutching a flower thatthe girl, Maggie, had stolen from an Italian.

She and Jimmie lived.

The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at anearly age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some redyears without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic. He studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse thanhe thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived arespect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that ithad smashed.

He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously inat a mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." While they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where hecalculated they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners wereimpatient over the pictured depths of their degradation. They werewaiting for soup-tickets.

A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to seethe portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter andhis hearers.

"You are damned," said the preacher. And the reader of soundsmight have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "Where'sour soup?"

Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented uponthe things that didn't concern them, with all the freedom ofEnglish gentlemen. When they grew thirsty and went out their mindsconfused the speaker with Christ.

Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopelessaltitude where grew fruit. His companion said that if heshould ever meet God he would ask for a million dollars and abottle of beer.

Jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcornersand watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passingof pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.

On the corners he was in life and of life. The world wasgoing on and he was there to perceive it.

He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressedmen. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all goodcoats covered faint hearts. He and his order were kings, to acertain extent, over the men of untarnished clothes, because theselatter dreaded, perhaps, to be either killed or laughed at.

Above all things he despised obvious Christians and cipherswith the chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes. Heconsidered himself above both of these classes. He was afraid ofneither the devil nor the leader of society.

When he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existencewas the greatest thing in the world. So, eventually, he feltobliged to work. His father died and his mother's years weredivided up into periods of thirty days.

He became a truck driver. He was given the charge of a painstakingpair of horses and a large rattling truck. He invaded the turmoiland tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictorydefiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag himfrom his perch and beat him.

In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself inhideous tangles. If he and his team chanced to be in the rear hepreserved a demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and burstingforth into yells when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneaththe noses of his champing horses. He smoked his pipe calmly for heknew that his pay was marching on.

If in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he enteredterrifically into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among thedrivers on their high seats, and sometimes roared oaths andviolently got himself arrested.

After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare uponall things. He became so sharp that he believed in nothing. Tohim the police were always actuated by malignant impulses and therest of the world was composed, for the most part, of despicablecreatures who were all trying to take advantage of him and withwhom, in defense, he was obliged to quarrel on all possibleoccasions. He himself occupied a down-trodden position thathad a private but distinct element of grandeur in its isolation.

The most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind,rampant upon the front platforms of all the street cars. At firsthis tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior.He became immured like an African cow. In him grew a majestic contemptfor those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.

He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, offixing his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horsesto begin, and then going into a sort of a trance of observation. Multitudes of drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers mightload him with opprobrium, he would not awaken until some bluepoliceman turned red and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beatthe soft noses of the responsible horses.

When he paused to contemplate the attitude of the policetoward himself and his fellows, he believed that they were the onlymen in the city who had no rights. When driving about, he feltthat he was held liable by the police for anything that might occurin the streets, and was the common prey of all energetic officials. In revenge, he resolved never to move out of the way of anything,until formidable circumstances, or a much larger man than himselfforced him to it.

Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insanedisregard for their legs and his convenience. He could notconceive their maniacal desires to cross the streets. Theirmadness smote him with eternal amazement. He was continuallystorming at them from his throne. He sat aloft and denounced theirfrantic leaps, plunges, dives and straddles.

When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champinghorses, making them swing their heads and move their feet,disturbing a solid dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools,for he himself could perceive that Providence had caused it clearlyto be written, that he and his team had the unalienable right to standin the proper path of the sun chariot, and if they so minded,obstruct its mission or take a wheel off.

And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire tostep down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute theright of way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by ascowling mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.

It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would havederided, in an axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferryboat. Yet he achieved a respect for a fire engine. As one chargedtoward his truck, he would drive fearfully upon a sidewalk,threatening untold people with annihilation. When an engine wouldstrike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it into fragments, as ablow annihilates a cake of ice, Jimmie's team could usually beobserved high and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk.The fearful coming of the engine could break up the most intricatemuddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been swearing forthe half of an hour.

A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thingthat he loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had beenknown to overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, strikingsparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creaturesto be ineffably admired. The clang of the gong pierced his breastlike a noise of remembered war.

When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested.Before he reached a great age, he had a fair record.

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truckand fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number ofmiscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that hadbecome known to the police. Once he had been arrested forassaulting a Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city,and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerableannoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals,into wailings about marriage and support and infants.

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderinglyand quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"