That way, obviously, ran the boy's malady toward madness. Regretting that I had chanced upon so unfortunate a topic, I said nothing. But he took my assent for granted. “So does mine,” he sighed. “It has not been moved nor touched since it was left vacant.” “Shall I read to you?” I asked, to turn his mind aside. “No. Talk to me. Tell me what they are doing in the Square.” So I gave him the news of Tailor Mac-Lachan's latest drunk, and Pushcart Tonio's luck in the lottery, and Grandma Souchet's _faux pas_ at the movies (her first experience) when she rose and yelled for the police to stop the pickpocket in the flagrant act of abstracting the heroine's aged father's watch, thereby disgracing her (grandma's) progeny and making them a derision and a byword even unto the third and fourth generation; and the Morrissey mumps, the whole kit and b'ilin' of juvenile Morrisseys having been sent to school looking like five little red balloons, whereby holiday for the rest of the scholars and great rejoicing, and the unavailing wrath of the authorities upon Mrs. Morrissey's head; and Terry the Cop's extra stripe; and the passing of the skat championship into the unworthy but preposterously lucky hands of the Avenue B Evening Dress Suit Club; and the battle over Orpheus the Piper (which was a jest of the Lords of High Derision, touching the boundaries of uttermost tragedy); and the exotic third stage of the affair, not yet ended, between Mary Moore and the Weeping Scion of Wealth; and the newspaper discovery of a barroom poet at Schmidt's free-lunch counter; and the joke which his fashionable uptown club put up on Cyrus the Gaunt; and politics and social doings, and the whisper of scandal; exactly as it might be in any other little world than Our Square; and, finally, for I was leading up to a delicate and difficult point, my own little smile of fortune, in the form of a small textbook finally accepted and advance royalty duly paid thereon. For the difficult and dangerous point was how to help the Gnome in case he needed it. Offer of charity, even when glossed over with the euphemism of a “loan,” is not accepted in ease of spirit by the people of Our Square. In fact, it isn't accepted at all, as a rule. The likelihood of ability to pay back is too dubious and remote. So it was in my most offhand manner that I inquired:-- “By the way, how are you off for ready cash?” Leon fluttered his hand among the papers on the bed. They were opened envelopes. “Look inside them,” he directed. Within were checks. They were on various mercantile and commercial firms. Mostly the amounts were small; two dollars, two-and-a-half, three, and four, and the largest for ten dollars. Totaled up they amounted to affluence as Our Square understands the term. “Something new?” I asked. “Yes. Advertising sketches. They've caught on.” “I didn't know that you could draw, Leon.” “Neither did I, beyond scratchy, sketchy blobs, until the Bonnie Lassie told me.