st I stood there at the window
and observed this, I could hear my landlady's servant singing in the
kitchen right alongside of my room. I knew the air she was singing, and
I listened to hear if she would sing false, and I said to myself that
an idiot could not have done all this.

I was, God be praised, all right in my senses as any man.

Suddenly, I saw two of the children down in the street fire up and
begin to abuse one another. Two little boys; I recognized one of them;
he was my landlady's son. I open the window to hear what they are
saying to one another, and immediately a flock of children crowded
together under my window, and looked wistfully up. What did they
expect? That something would be thrown down? Withered flowers, bones,
cigar ends, or one thing or another, that they could amuse themselves
with? They looked up with their frost-pinched faces and unspeakably
wistful eyes. In the meantime, the two small foes continued to revile
one another.

Words like great buzzing noxious insects swarm out of their childish
mouths; frightful nicknames, thieves' slang, sailors' oaths, that they
perhaps had learnt down on the wharf; and they are both so engaged that
they do not notice my landlady, who rushes out to see what is going on.

"Yes," explains her son, "he catched me by the throat; I couldn't
breaths for ever so long," and turning upon the little man who is the
cause of the quarrel, and who is standing grinning maliciously at him,
he gets perfectly furious, and yells, "Go to hell, Chaldean ass that
you are! To think such vermin as you should catch folk by the throat. I
will, may the Lord...."

And the mother, this pregnant woman, who dominates the whole street
with her size, answers the ten-year-old child, as she seizes him by the
arm and tries to drag him in:

"Sh--sh. Hold your jaw! I just like to hear the way you swear, too, as
if you had been in a brothel for years. Now, in with you."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I won't."

I stand up in the window and see that the mother's temper is rising;
this disagreeable scene excites me frightfully. I can't endure it any
longer. I call down to the boy to come up to me for a minute; I call
twice, just to distract them--to change the scene. The last time I call
very loudly, and the mother turns round flurriedly and looks up at me.
She regains her self-possession at once, looks insolently at me, nay,
downright maliciously, and enters the house with a