dropped her voice, and after a second Mrs. Kenny
exclaimed--

"Cora, you're a bad gurl to hark to such goings on, much less belave
thim," and pushed her daughter back and brought out herself the crowning
delicacy of the feast, a dish that needed no foreign help to compose,
steaming praties cooked in their shimmies, as she expressed it. Cora sat
down by High-Falutini, Mrs. Kenny went into the next room to her
littlest children, and Kenny lit a fresh pipe, held the bowl in his
hand, and opposite his distractingly pretty little daughter kept a
thoughtful eye upon the pair. And Fairfax went upstairs two steps at a
time.

* * * * *

It was after eleven, dense and hot, but he had gone up eagerly. Of late,
whenever he had a few spare moments he took them, and all Sundays he
remained in his room. There was an odour in the apartment, one that
persistently rose above the tenement smells, a damp, moist, earthy
perfume, to Fairfax delicious beyond words. Mosquitoes were rampant,
but he had been brought up in a mosquito-ridden country, and he had
rigged a bit of muslin across his window, and burned Mrs. Kenny's gas
with heartless inconsideration.

On a small wooden stool stood something covered with cloths damped night
and morning by Fairfax, and during the day by Matty Kenny, a
public-school girl of twelve years of age, a pretty, half-witted little
creature, whom of all Nut Street Fairfax liked and whom he blindly
trusted. Between school hours the little girl ran up and patted with a
sponge the mysterious image in Misther Fairfax's hall room. Tell? Ah,
shure, Misther Fairfax, cross her heart and hope to die but she'd not.
As her duties consisted in tidying Antony's room, her visits were not
remarked. Now Antony lifted off the first cloth; he drew out the stool
under the light, flung off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his
cravat, got from his drawer a small spatular instrument, and looking at
his unveiled work, meditatively wiped the dried clay from his tool. Then
he drew off the last bit of cheesecloth, uncovering a statuette modelled
in clay with great delicacy and great assurance. The gaslight fell
yellow on it and the little statue seemed to swim, to oscillate and
illumine. It was the figure of a little girl, her hair loose around her
face, holding to her cheek a dead blackbird. The art of the work was its
great sincerity, the calm, assured modelling, the tender truthfulness;
the fo