The driver whipped up his horse and drove off, and the porter, taking one foot in each hand and stepping backward, dragged her along as if she had been a corpse. I lost control of myself and made a rush at him, but as luck would have it, I hurled myself against, or accidentally ran into a rainwater-barrel, which saved both the porter and me a great deal of unpleasantness. Striking him on the rebound, I knocked him over, darted up the steps, and desperately pulled the bell-handle. Some infuriated people rushed on the scene, and as I could not explain anything, I went away, picking up the barrel. On the way I overtook the cab. The driver looked down at me from the coach-box and said: "You knocked him over smartly." I asked him angrily how he could allow the porter to make sport of the girl, and he replied calmly, with a fastidious air: "As for me, let them go to the dogs! A gentleman paid me when he put her in my cab. What is it to me if one person beats another?" "And if he had killed her?" "Oh, well; you soon kill that sort!" said the driver, as if he had repeatedly tried to kill drunken girls. After that I saw the porter nearly every day. When I passed up the street he would be sweeping the pavement, or sitting on the steps as if he were waiting for me. As I approached him he would stand up, tuck up his sleeves, and announce kindly: "I am going to smash you to atoms now!" He was over forty, small, bow-legged, with a pendulous paunch. When he laughed he looked at me with beaming eyes, and it was terribly strange to me to see that they were kind and merry. He could not fight, because his arms were shorter than mine, and after two or three turns he let me go, leaned his back against the gate, and said, apparently in great surprise: "All right; you wait, clever!" These fights bored me, and one day I said to him: "Listen, fool! Why don't you let me alone?" "Why do you fight, then?" he asked reproachfully. I asked him in turn why he had maltreated the girl. "What did it matter to you? Are you sorry for her?" "Of course I am!" He was silent, rubbing his lips, and then asked: "And would you be sorry for a cat?" "Yes, I should." Then he said: "You are a fool, rascal! Wait; I'll show you something." I never could avoid passing up that street--it was the shortest way--but I began to get up earlier, in order not to meet the man. However, in a few days I saw him again, sitting on the steps and stroking a smoke-colored cat which lay on his knees. When I was about three paces from him he jumped up, seized the cat by the legs, and dashed its head against the stone balustrade, so that I was splashed with the warm blood. He then hurled the cat under my feet and stood at the gate, crying: "What now?"