Down on the bank of the bayou, beyond the car shops, the foundries, the lumbermills and the great manufactories that go to make Houston the wonderful business and trade center she is, stands--or rather, leans--a little shanty. It is made of clapboards, old planks, pieces of tin and odds and ends of lumber picked up here and there. It is built close to the edge of the foul and sluggish bayou. Back of it rises the bank full ten feet high; below it, only a few feet, ripples the sullen tide. In this squalid hut lives Crip. Crip is nine years old. He is freckled-faced, thin and subdued. From his knee his left leg is gone and in its place is a clumsy wooden stump, on which he limps around at quite a wonderful pace. Crip's mother cleans up three or four offices on Main Street and takes in washing at other times. Somehow, they manage to live in this tottering habitation patched up by Crip's father, who several years before had fallen into the bayou one night while drunk, and what was left of him by the catfish was buried upon the bank a hundred yards farther down. Of late, Crip had undertaken to assist in the mutual support. One morning he came stumping timidly into the office of the Post and purchased a few papers. These he offered for sale upon the streets with great diffidence. Crip had no difficulty in selling his papers. People stopped and bought readily the wares of this shrinking, weak-voiced youngster. His wooden leg caught the eye of hurrying passersby and the nickels rained into his hand as long as he had any papers left. One morning Crip failed to call for his papers. The next day he did not appear, nor the next, and one of the newsboys was duly questioned as to his absence. "Crip's got de pewmonia," he said. The Post Man, albeit weighed down by numerous tribulations of others and his own, when night comes puts on his overcoat and wends his way down the bayou toward the home of Crip. The air is chilly and full of mist, and great puddles left by the recent rains glimmer and sparkle in the electric lights. No wonder that pneumonia has laid its cold hand upon the frail and weakly Crip, living as he does in the rain-soaked shanty down on the water's edge. The Post Man goes to inquire if he has had a doctor and if he is supplied with the necessities his condition must require. He walks down the railroad tracks and comes close upon two figures marching with uncertain stateliness in the same direction. One of them speaks loudly, with oratorical flourish, but with an exaggerated carefulness that proclaims he is in a certain stage of intoxication. His voice is well known in the drawing-rooms and the highest social circles of Houston. His name is--well, let us call him Old Boy, for so do his admiring companions denominate him. There comes hurrying past them the form of a somberly-clad woman.