“No, I’m afraid that Blackie hasn’t had much time for morals. But, Norah dear, I wish that you could hear him when he talks about his mother. He may follow doubtful paths, and associate with questionable people, and wear restless clothes, but I wouldn’t exchange his friendship for that of a dozen of your ordinary so-called good men. All these years of work and suffering have made an old man of little Blackie, although he is young in years. But they haven’t spoiled his heart any. He is able to distinguish between sham and truth because he has been obliged to do it ever since he was a child selling papers on the corner. But he still clings to the office that gave him his start, although he makes more money in a single week outside the office than his salary would amount to in half a year. He says that this is a job that does not interfere with his work.” Such is Blackie. Surely the oddest friend a woman ever had. He possesses a genius for friendship, and a wonderful understanding of suffering, born of those years of hardship and privation. Each learned the other’s story, bit by bit, in a series of confidences exchanged during that peaceful, beatific period that follows just after the last edition has gone down. Blackie’s little cubby-hole of an office is always blue with smoke, and cluttered with a thousand odds and ends—photographs, souvenirs, boxing-gloves, a litter of pipes and tobacco, a wardrobe of dust-covered discarded coats and hats, and Blackie in the midst of it all, sunk in the depths of his swivel chair, and looking like an amiable brown gnome, or a cheerful little joss-house god come to life. There is in him an uncanny wisdom which only the streets can teach. He is one of those born newspaper men who could not live out of sight of the ticker-tape, and the copy-hook and the proof-sheet. “Y’ see, girl, it’s like this here,” Blackie explained one day. “W’re all workin’ for some good reason. A few of us are workin’ for the glory of it, and most of us are workin’ t’ eat, and lots of us are pluggin’ an’ savin’ in the hopes that some day we’ll have money enough to get back at some people we know; but there is some few workin’ for the pure love of the work—and I guess I’m one of them fools. Y’ see, I started in at this game when I was such a little runt that now it’s a ingrowing habit, though it is comfortin’ t’ know you got a place where you c’n always come in out of the rain, and where you c’n have your mail sent.”