WOULD be mean. I don't want 'em." As he turned from her to pick up
the box, Maria took advantage of the moment to steal three "mats" of
sponge-gold out of the glass saucer. Often she stole McTeague's gold,
almost under his very eyes; indeed, it was so easy to do so that there
was but little pleasure in the theft. Then Maria took herself off.
McTeague returned to the sofa and flung himself upon it face downward.

A little before supper time Maria completed her search. The flat was
cleaned of its junk from top to bottom. The dirty pillow-case was full
to bursting. She took advantage of the supper hour to carry her bundle
around the corner and up into the alley where Zerkow lived.

When Maria entered his shop, Zerkow had just come in from his daily
rounds. His decrepit wagon stood in front of his door like a stranded
wreck; the miserable horse, with its lamentable swollen joints, fed
greedily upon an armful of spoiled hay in a shed at the back.

The interior of the junk shop was dark and damp, and foul with all
manner of choking odors. On the walls, on the floor, and hanging from
the rafters was a world of debris, dust-blackened, rust-corroded.
Everything was there, every trade was represented, every class of
society; things of iron and cloth and wood; all the detritus that a
great city sloughs off in its daily life. Zerkow's junk shop was the
last abiding-place, the almshouse, of such articles as had outlived
their usefulness.

Maria found Zerkow himself in the back room, cooking some sort of a meal
over an alcohol stove. Zerkow was a Polish Jew--curiously enough his
hair was fiery red. He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd. He
had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown