around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging
suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing
themselves under the ever moving beard.

And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise--a faint
crunching noise.

He listened.

The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained
bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a
purring, uncertain sound.

"They're shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing," he
mused. "It is life ... life...."

He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd,
and smiled.

"Life," he repeated....

He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if
stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.

"But who was the old man?" he thought.

A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip
pressing against him for a moment.

A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He
felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was
gone. On he walked.

Three young men confronted him for a second time. He passed between two
of them, squeezed by their shoulders.

A shapeless old woman bumped him with her back as she shuffled past.

Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.

The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about
him.

Then he laughed.

"Life," he murmured again; and

"I am the old man," he added, "I ... I...."

T.B.[8]

BY FANNIE HURST

From _The Saturday Evening Post_

[8] Copyright, 1915, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1916,
by Fannie Hurst.

The figurative underworld of a great city has no ventilation, housing
or lighting problems. Rooks and crooks who live in the putrid air of
crime are not denied the light of day, even though they loathe it.
Cadets, social skunks, whose carnivorous eyes love darkness, walk in
God's sunshine and breathe God's air. Scarlet women turn over in wide
beds and draw closer velvet curtains to shut out the morning. Gamblers
curse the dawn.

But what of the literal underworld of the great city? What of the
babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What
of the Subway trackwalker, purblind from gloom; the coalstoker, whose
fiery tomb is the boiler room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a
flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead
Chinese; six-