befell him. He became " T. T." instead of Mr. Tembarom, except to
Joseph Hutchinson and his 'daughter. Hutchinson called him Tembarom,
but Little Ann said " Mr. Tembarom " with quaint frequency when she
spoke to him.

"Landed anything to-day, T. T. ? " some one would ask almost every
evening, and the interest in his relation of the day's adventures
increased from week to week. Little Ann never asked questions and
seldom made comments, but she always listened attentively. She had
gathered, and guessed from what she had gathered, a rather definite
idea of what his hard young life had been. He did not tell pathetic
stories about himself, but he and Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger
had become fast friends, and the genial smoking of cheap tobacco in
hall bedrooms tends to frankness of relation, and the various ways in
which each had found himself "up against it" in the course of their
brief years supplied material for anecdotal talk.

"But it's bound to be easier from now on," he would say. "I've got
the 'short' down pretty fine - not fine enough to make big money, but
enough to hold down a job with Galton. He's mighty good to me. If I
knew more, I believe he'd give me a column to take care of--Up-town
Society column perhaps. A fellow named Biker's got it. Twenty per.
Goes on a bust twice a month, the fool. Gee! I wish I had his job!"

Mrs. Bowse's house was provided with a parlor in which her boarders
could sit in the evening when so inclined. It was a fearsome room,
which, when the dark, high-ceilinged hall was entered, revealed
depths of dingy gloom which appeared splashed in spots with
incongruous brilliancy of color. This effect was produced by richly
framed department-store chromo lithographs on the walls, aided by