"Do it again, and I'll break you." The first person came out of the
uptown palace like a fairy from a grotto; the second emerged from the
downtown rookery like some prehistoric monster from a cave.

At a distance you might have mistaken him for an electrician or a
sewer-expert coming into view through one of those round holes in the
sidewalk by which access is provided to the subterranean apparatus of
cities. But, drawing nearer, you perceived that he was but half a man,
who stood upon the six-inch stubs of what had once been a pair of legs.
But what nature could do for what was left of him nature had done. He
had the neck, the arms, and the torso of a Hercules. His coat, black,
threadbare, shining, and unpleasantly spotted, seemed on the point of
giving way here and there to a system of restless and enormous muscles.
But that these should serve no better purpose than ceaselessly to turn
the handle of an unusually diminutive and tuneless street-organ might
have roused in the observer's mind doubts as to the wisdom and vigilance
of that divine providence which is so much better understood and trusted
by the healthy and fortunate than by the wretched, the maimed, and
the diseased.

For the most part the legless man went about the business of begging
among the business men of the city, since from the congested slum into
which he disappeared at night it was no great feat for a man of his
power to reach the more northern streets of that circle in whose midst
the finances of the nation by turns simmer, boil, and boil over. It was
not unusual, during the noon-time rush of self-centred individuals, for
the legless man to get himself stridden into and bowled clean over upon
his face or back, since nothing is more loosening to purse-strings than
the average man's horror at having injured some creature already maimed;
nor was it unusual for him at such times to scramble up smiling with a