lived in the extreme northern part of Philadelphia, where the cotton-
and woollen-mills run down to the river, and how he ever got home
after leaving the _Press_ building at two in the morning, was one
of the mysteries of the office. Sometimes he caught a night car, and
sometimes he walked all the way, arriving at the little house, where
his mother and himself lived alone, at four in the morning.
Occasionally he was given a ride on an early milk-cart, or on one of
the newspaper delivery wagons, with its high piles of papers still
damp and sticky from the press. He knew several drivers of "night
hawks"--those cabs that prowl the streets at night looking for belated
passengers--and when it was a very cold morning he would not go home
at all, but would crawl into one of these cabs and sleep, curled up on
the cushions, until daylight.

Besides being quick and cheerful, Gallegher possessed a power of
amusing the _Press's_ young men to a degree seldom attained by the
ordinary mortal. His clog-dancing on the city editor's desk, when that
gentleman was up-stairs fighting for two more columns of space, was
always a source of innocent joy to us, and his imitations of the
comedians of the variety halls delighted even the dramatic critic,
from whom the comedians themselves failed to force a smile.

But Gallegher's chief characteristic was his love for that element of
news generically classed as "crime." Not that he ever did anything
criminal himself. On the contrary, his was rather the work of the
criminal specialist, and his morbid interest in the doings of all
queer characters, his knowledge of their methods, their present
whereabouts, and their past deeds of transgression often rendered him
a valuable ally to our police reporter, whose daily feuilletons were
the only portion of the paper Gallegher deigned to read.