"Shuffler! How knowest thou thou art not spreading to the world the germs
of scarlet fever and typhoid picked up in the sweaters' dens?"

"What cares _he_?" cried a tall, thin man, with a slight stoop and gold
spectacles. "Does he not poison the air every day with the smoke of his
coal fires?"

"Pison the air!" repeated a battered, blear-eyed reprobate. "He pisoned
my soul. He ruined me with promiskus charity. Whenever I was stoney-broke
'e give me doles in aid, 'e did. 'E wos werry bad to me, 'e wos. 'E
destroyed my self-respeck, druv me to drink, broke up my home, and druv
my darters on the streets."

"This is what comes of undisciplined compassion," observed the
gold-spectacled gentleman, glowering at me. "The integrity and virtue of
a whole family sacrificed to the gratification of thy altruistic
emotions!"

"Stand out of the way!" I cried to the burly man; "I wish to leave my own
house."

"And carry thy rudeness abroad?" he retorted indignantly. "Perchance thou
wouldst like to go to the Continent, and swagger through Europe clad in
thy loud-patterned checks and thine insular self-sufficiency."

I tried to move him out of the way by brute force, and we wrestled, and
he threw me. I heard myself strike the floor with a thud.

Rubbing my eyes, instead of my back, I discovered that I was safe in my