I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old but still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall. * * * * * It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall. * * * * * I would moisten dry lips. * * * * * I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of the wall. * * * * * I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who live on the further side of the wall. * * * * * My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of the dark ground under the wall. * * * * * My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall. And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made. After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring—the theatre in which the woman was employed was dark for a long time and they were more than usually hard up, so the woman tried to pick up a little extra money—to help pay the rent I suppose—by sub-letting the two little back rooms of that place of theirs. Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can’t make out as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chicago called “flops” where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten cents and they are more patronized than respectable people know anything about. What I did discover was a little woman—she wasn’t so young but she was hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of her as a girl—who once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks. She had a job as ironer in a small hand-laundry in the neighborhood and someone had given her a cheap folding cot. She was a curiously sentimental creature, with the kind of hurt eyes deformed people often have, and I have a fancy she had herself a romantic attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I managed to find out a lot from her. After the other woman’s death and after Wilson had been cleared on the murder charge, by the confession of the stage-hand, I used to go over to the house where he had lived, sometimes in the late afternoon after our paper had been put to bed for the day. Ours is an afternoon paper and after two o’clock most of us are free. I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one day and began talking with her. She was a gold mine. There was that look in her eyes I’ve told you of, the hurt sensitive look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson. She had lived in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that at once.