istcoat buttons straining
over his chest, coat buttons refusing to recognise a buttonhole save
that at the waist. Circumstances these that added measurably to his
apparent age, lending him the semblance of maturity attained while
still in the shell of youth.

The ruddy brown hair thatching his well-modelled head, his sanguine
colouring, friendly blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage;
and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were
strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore
out the suggestion with an added hint of gentle blood.

But whatever his antecedents, the fact is indisputable that P.
Sybarite, just then, was most miserable, and not without cause; for
the Genius of the Place held his soul in Its melancholy bondage.

The Place was the counting-room in the warehouse of Messrs. Whigham &
Wimper, _Hides & Skins_; and the Genius of it was the reek of hides
both raw and dressed--an effluvium incomparable, a passionate
individualist of an odour, as rich as the imagination of an editor of
Sunday supplements, as rare as a reticent author, as friendly as a
stray puppy.

For ten endless years the body and soul of P. Sybarite had been thrall
to that Smell; for a complete decade he had inhaled it continuously
nine hours each day, six days each week--and had felt lonesome without
it on every seventh day.

But to-day all his being was in revolt, bitterly, hopelessly mutinous
against this evil and overbearing Genius....

The warehouse--impregnable lair of the Smell, from which it leered
smug defiance at the sea-sweet atmosphere of the lower city--occupied
a walled-in arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, fronting on Frankfort Street,
in that part of Town still known to elder inhabitants as "the Swamp."
Above rumbled the everlasting inter-borough traffic; to the right, on
rising ground, were haunts of roaring type-mills grinding an endless
grist of news; to the left, through a sudden dip and down a long
decline, a world of sober-sided warehouses, degenerating into slums,
circumscribed by sleepy South Street; all, this afternoon, warm and
languorous in the lazy breeze of a sunny April Saturday.

The counting-room was a cubicle contrived by enclosing a corner of the
ground-floor with two walls and a ceiling of match-boarding. Into this
constricted space were huddled two imposing roll-top desks, P.
Sybarite's high counter, and the small flat desk of the shipping
clerk, with a