deous. I did not know
then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic
of the constitution in which there is not the proper coordination of
muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can
now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that
tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering,
mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--I can see in that girl-face framed by a
trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape,
one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature
doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed.

I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my
Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with
Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did
not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future
home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by
which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part
eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front,
with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be
found in New York.

In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into
Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our
walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well
have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.

The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an
elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which
the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and
majestic upon the horizon.

A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture,
and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge;
but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and
followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The
street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened
warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through
the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy
getting supper.

It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid
streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of
being p