t he felt. Thrown
together with these strange men of a different class, he learned new
things of life, and at first he was as amused as a child at play. He
made two dollars a day. This amply fed him and kept him, and he put by,
with a miserliness that was out of all keeping with his temperament,
every cent he could spare from the necessities of life.

Not that Fairfax had any plans.

From the first opening of his eyes on West Albany, when he had crawled
out of the baggage car in the dawn, he shut out his past from himself.
He crushed back even his own identity. He earned his bread by the sweat
of his brow in the real sense of the word, and for what reason he saved
his money he could not have told. He had become a day labourer, a
fireman on the New York Central road, and he was a first-rate hand. His
figure in the rude, dirty clothes, his bowler always worn on the back of
his blonde head, his limp (that big boot had gone hard with him on the
day that he applied for a job at the boss's office), all were familiar
in Nut Street by this. His voice, his smile, his rare good heart, made
him a popular companion, and he was, too, popular with the women.

His miserable reception in New York, the bruises inflicted upon him by
Cedersholm and his uncle, had embittered Tony Fairfax to an extent of
which his humble Nut Street friends were ignorant. He didn't do them any
harm, however. If any harm were done at all--and there is a question
even regarding that--it was done to himself, for he crushed down his
ambitions, he thrust them out of his heart, and he bit the dust with a
feeling of vengeance. He had been a gentleman with talent, and his own
world had not wanted him; so he went down to the people. All that his
mother knew was that he had gone on to the north of the State, to
perfect certain branches of his art, and that it was better for him to
be in Albany. Reclining under the vines, she read his letters, smiling,
fanning herself with a languid hand.

"Emmy, Master Tony's getting on, getting on."

"Yas'm, Mis' Bella, I do speck he is."

"Listen, Emmy." And Mrs. Fairfax would read aloud to the devoted negro
the letters planned, concocted, by her son in his miserable lodgings,
letters which cost him the keenest pangs of his life, kind and tender
lines; things he would have done if he could; things he had hoped for
and knew would never come true; joys he meant to bring her and that he
knew she would grow old and never see; succ