ving found a sympathetic
listener, launched out upon his earlier experiences among opera stars,
especially his acquaintance with Patti, whom he had known before
she became great and whom he always spoke of as devotees do of the
Madonna--with bated breath and a sigh of despair that he would never
hear her again.

Then, too, there was Codman. O'Day was always enthusiastic over Codman.
"I have taken a great fancy to that fishmonger, and a fine fellow he
is," he said one night to Kitty and John. "His shop was shut when I
first called on him, but he was good enough to open it at my knock,
and I have just spent half an hour, and a very delightful half-hour,
watching him handle the sea food, as he calls it, in his big
refrigerator. I got a look, too, at his chest and his arms, and at
his pretty wife and children. She is really the best type of the two.
American, you say, both of them, and a fine pair they are, and he
tells me he pulled a surf-boat in your coast-guard when he was a lad of
twenty, then took up fishing, and then went into Fulton Market, helping
at a stall, and now he is up here with two delivery wagons and four
assistants and is a member of a fish union, whatever that is.
It's astonishing! And yet I have met him many a time pushing his
baby-carriage around the block."

"Yes," Kitty answered, putting on a shovel of coal, "and I'll lay ye a
wager, Mr. O'Day, that Polly Codman will be drivin' through Central Park
in her carriage before five years is out; and she deserves it, for there
ain't a finer woman from here to the Battery."

"I am quite sure of it, Mistress Kitty. That is where the American comes
in--or, perhaps it is the New Yorker. I have not been here long enough
to find out."

Of all these neighbors, however, it was Timothy Kelsey, the hunchback,
largely because of his misfortunes and especially because of his vivid
contrast to all the others, who appealed to him most. Tim, as has been
said, kept the second-hand book-shop, half-way down the block on the
opposite side of the street. He was but a year or two older than O'Day,
but you would never have supposed it had Tim not told you--and not then
unless you had looked close and followed the lines of care deep cut in
his face and the wrinkles that crowded close to his deep, hollowed-out
eyes. When he was a boy of two, his sister, a girl of six, had let him
drop to the sidewalk, and he had never since straightened his back. The
customary outlets by which