and profitable position in the Police Department, ripping off his
badge and buttons and washing into the hands of his lawyers the
solid pieces of real estate that his frugality had enabled him to
accumulate. The passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month
after his dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck
from his free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from
her nest, and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after
that he acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and
wrote complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he fought
the attendant at the Municipal Lodging House who tried to give
him a bath. When Murray first saw him he was holding the hand of
an Italian woman who sold apples and garlic on Essex street, and
quoting the words of a song book ballad.

Murray's fall had been more Luciferian, if less spectacular. All
the pretty, tiny little kickshaws of Gotham had once been his. The
megaphone man roars out at you to observe the house of his uncle on
a grand and revered avenue. But there had been an awful row about
something, and the prince had been escorted to the door by the
butler, which, in said avenue, is equivalent to the impact of the
avuncular shoe. A weak Prince Hal, without inheritance or sword, he
drifted downward to meet his humorless Falstaff, and to pick the
crusts of the streets with him.

One evening they sat on a bench in a little downtown park. The great
bulk of the Captain, which starvation seemed to increase--drawing
irony instead of pity to his petitions for aid--was heaped against
the arm of the bench in a shapeless mass. His red face, spotted by
tufts of vermilion, week-old whiskers and topped by a sagging white
straw hat, looked, in the gloom, like one of those structures that
you may observe in a dark Third avenue window, challenging your
imagination to say whether it be something recent in the way of
ladies' hats or a strawberry shortcake. A tight-drawn belt--last
relic of his official spruceness--made a deep furrow in his
circumference. The Captain's shoes were buttonless. In a smothered
bass he cursed his star of ill-luck.

Murray, at his side, was shrunk into his dingy and ragged suit of
blue serge. His hat was pulled low; he sat quiet and a little
indistinct, like some ghost that had been dispossessed.

"I'm hungry," growled the Captain--"by the top sirloin of the Bull
of Bashan, I'm starving to death. Right now I cou