ther, and who always had a job for him with the
"growler" when he came home, they were having Skippy on the run.
Probably that was how he got his name. No one cared enough about it,
or about the boy, to find out.

Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there
any boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had
gone? And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did
they ever have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's
young brain once in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy
had not been trained to think; what training the boys picked up in the
alley didn't run much to deep thinking.

Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as other men did
once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of
them who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from
under the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if
it had killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that,
for there was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to
the gin-mill for him that very day twice?

Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
awning, the sun came over the housetops and looked down for an hour or
two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
upon unnumbered ash barrels. A stray cabbage leaf in one of those was
the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.

Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up
a real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him
of. The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man
scraped it off and p