Every morning at eight o'clock the Meanest Man went to his office somewhere far downtown where, it was understood, he did something sly and underhanded connected with notes and loans. Every afternoon at four o'clock he visited the local Y. M. C. A., where he was (mistakenly) supposed to put in his hour and a half in reading, on the theory that it was cheaper to patronize that library than to buy books or rent them from the penny circulator. The rest of his life was strictly and determinedly private. Passing to and fro upon his concerns, he faced the denizens of Our Square with the blank regard of huge, horn-rimmed, blue glasses which he always wore out of doors. Only for Terry the Cop, MacLachan, the Little Red Doctor, and Cyrus the Gaunt, did he have a curt, silent nod, and for the Bonnie Lassie an awkward bow. The rest of us might as well not have existed. Naturally there were few who had a good word for him. Of these Terry the Cop was one. “Anyway, he has a grand pair of hands,” Terry has been heard to aver. On the strength of this opinion, the Bonnie Lassie, who needed a really superior pair of hands for a sculpture which she was then employed upon, made a point of catching Miles Morse in the park and compelling him to shake hands with her, to his resentful embarrassment. Subsequently she took our guardian of the peace to task. “I don't know what you could have been thinking of, Terry,” she declared. “His hands are knuckly outside and puffy inside.” “You should see'em in the court,” said Terry cryptically. Not clearly comprehending what standing in court Mr. Morse's hands would give him, the Bonnie Lassie dropped the subject. On her own account, however, she had a suspicion of redeeming qualities in the Meanest Man. For one thing, she knew of a battered and disreputable kitten, rescued by Miles Morse from a strong and hostile combination of small boys and big dogs, at no small peril to himself, and taken to the very private house, where it grew into battered and disreputable but competent cathood and now welcomed him home every evening with extravagant demonstrations of regard. Also a certain scene enacted in sight of her studio windows had stuck in her memory; a powerful and half-drunken brute of a teamster flaying an overdone horse; the interposition of the Meanest Man; the infuriated descent, whip in hand, of the driver; the rush at the spare, trim, uncombative-looking man who had removed his spectacles and pocketed them; then the inexplicable and dismayed check in mid onset of the assailant. The Bonnie Lassie couldn't understand it at all; she couldn't see why that avalanche of wrath, profanity, and bulk didn't simply overwhelm its object--until she ran to the door and opened it. Then she saw Miles Morse's face and understood. It had hardened into a contraction of rage so savage, so concentrated, so murderous, that the drink-inspired fury of the human brute paled before it.