gnon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his
skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street--

Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk arose with a feeling of disquiet that he did not
understand. With a practised foot he rolled three of his younger
brothers like logs out of his way as they lay sleeping on the floor.
Before a foot-square looking glass hung by the window he stood and
shaved himself. If that may seem to you a task too slight to be
thus impressively chronicled, I bear with you; you do not know of
the areas to be accomplished in traversing the cheek and chin of Mr.
McQuirk.

McQuirk, senior, had gone to work long before. The big son of the
house was idle. He was a marble-cutter, and the marble-cutters were
out on a strike.

"What ails ye?" asked his mother, looking at him curiously; "are ye
not feeling well the morning, maybe now?"

"He's thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle," impudently explained
younger brother Tim, ten years old.

"Tiger" reached over the hand of a champion and swept the small
McQuirk from his chair.

"I feel fine," said he, "beyond a touch of the
I-don't-know-what-you-call-its. I feel like there was going to be
earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills and fever or maybe a
picnic. I don't know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a
policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across
the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs."

"It's the spring in yer bones," said Mrs. McQuirk. "It's the sap
risin'. Time was when I couldn't keep me feet still nor me head cool
when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin'.
'Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian
bark at the druggist's."

"Back up!" said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently. "There's no spring in
sight. There's snow yet on the shed in Donovan's backyard. And
yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the
janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of
winter, by all the signs that be."

After breakfast Mr. McQuirk spent fifteen minutes before the
corrugated mirror, subjugating his hair and arranging his
green-and-purple ascot with its amethyst tombstone pin--eloquent of
his chosen calling.

Since the strike had been called it was this particular striker's
habit to hie himself each morning to the corner saloon of Flaherty
Brothers, and there establish himself upon the sidewalk, with one
foot resting on the bootblack's stand, observing the