his earnings, he was old enough to enter a little way into this adult
and despicable joy. Be this as it may, he was not the next instant up
again and busy. He caught up his cap, dropped it not on his head but on
one of his ragged knees; planted a sturdy hand on it and the other
sturdy hand on the other knee; and with his sturdy legs swinging under
the bench, toe kicking heel and heel kicking toe, he rested briefly
from life's battle.

The signs of battle were thick on him, unmistakable. The palpable sign,
the conqueror's sign, was the profits won in the struggle of the
streets. The other signs may be set down as loss--dirt and raggedness
and disorder. His hair might never have been straightened out with a
comb; his hands were not politely mentionable; his coarse shoes, which
seemed to have been bought with the agreement that they were never to
wear out, were ill-conditioned with general dust and the special grime
of melted pitch from the typical contractor's cheapened asphalt; one of
his stockings had a fresh rent and old rents enlarged their grievances.

A single sign of victory was better even than the money in the
pocket--the whole lad himself. He was strongly built, frankly
fashioned, with happy grayish eyes, which had in them some of the cold
warrior blue of the sky that day; and they were set wide apart in a
compact round head, which somehow suggested a bronze sphere on a column
of triumph. Altogether he belonged to that hillside of nature, himself a
human growth budding out of wintry fortunes into life's April, opening
on the rocks hardy and all white.

But to sit there swinging his legs--this did not suffice to satisfy his
heart, did not enable him to celebrate his instincts; and suddenly from
his thicket of forest trees and greening bushes he began to pour forth a