ssion was sweet.

Colorless as were his cheeks and lips, nevertheless he did not seem a
pale boy, this because his brows were a misty yellow-white, and his
thick lashes flaxen; while his eyes were an indescribable mixture of
glowing gray and blue plentifully flecked with yellow. Perfectly
adjusted were these straight-looking eyes, and set far apart. By turns
they were quick, and bold, and open, and full of eager inquiry; or they
were thoughtfully half covered by their heavy lids, very still, and far
sighted. And when he laughed, what with the shine of his hair and brows
and light lashes, and the flash of his eyes and his teeth, the effect
was as if sunlight were upon his face--though the sun so seldom shone
upon him that he had not one boyish freckle.

Such was Johnnie Smith.

Just now he was looking smaller and less sunlit than usual. This was
because Big Tom bulked in front of him, delivering the final orders for
the day before going down the three flights of stairs, out into the
brick-paved area, thence through a dank, ground-floor hall which bored
its way from end to end of another tenement, and into the crowded East
Side street, and so to his work on the docks.

Barber was a huge-shouldered, long-armed slouch of a man, with a
close-cropped head (flat at the back) upon which great hairy ears stood
out like growths. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging, the left with an
elusive cast in it that showed only now and then, when it testified to
the kink in his brain. His nose, uneven in its downward trend, was so
fat and wide and heavy that it fairly sprawled upon his face; and its
cavernous, black nostrils made it seem to possess something that, to
Johnnie, was like a personality--as if it were a queer sort of snakish
thing, carefully watched over by the bulging, bloodshot eyes.

For Barber's nose had the power of moving itself as Johnnie had seen no
other nose move. Slowly and steadily it went up and down whenever Barber
ate or talked--as even Johnnie's small, straight nose would often do.
But whenever Big Tom laughed--sneeringly or boastfully or in ugly
triumph--the nose would make a sudden, sidewise twist.

But something besides its power to move made it seem a live and separate
thing: the longshoreman troubled himself to shave only of a Sunday
morning, when, with all the stiff, dark growth cleared away to right and
left--for Barber's beard grew almost to his eyes--his nose, though bent
and purplish, was fairly l