He came to a street in which, for the space of a single block, the shops and houses were evidently deserted; and in the middle of this block, before a shop with broken windows, deserted apparently like the rest, the boy stopped, and pushing open the front door, went in. I came up quickly, and peeping in at the same door saw a vacant room within, in which remnants of old merchandise were lying about in disorder, and dirt and refuse lay everywhere on the floor. I went in quietly and crossed the room to a door at the rear, and opening it on a crack saw the boy stooping down in a paved yard. I heard the boy speak, without hearing what he said, and saw him descend by some means into the ground and disappear. I ran to the spot and knelt down beside an iron grating, some three feet square, which I found there in the pavement. I heard from below a rumble, succeeded by a clatter, and then there was silence. Laying down my pack on the ground I pulled at the grating, and found that it rose on hinges, like a trapdoor. I opened it, and saw beneath it a ladder. I stepped on the top rung, and went down. _The Man with the Ball in the Underground Alley_ At the bottom I found myself at one end of a dimly lighted room, very long and very narrow, like an enclosed alley; and near by was the boy, and beside him a grown man, both intent on something at the other end of the room. The man was swinging in his right hand a large wooden ball, and as I watched him he cried out, laughing cheerily: “Never mind, Figli! This time I’ll make a strike! Only forty-seven more to make! Now watch!” He hurled the ball from him along the floor, and it rolled swiftly to the far end of the room, where it crashed in among ten large wooden bottles, standing upright on the floor. He was playing tenpins. “Oh!” cried the boy called Figli. “Only seven!” “Never mind, never mind,” said the Bowler, cheerfully, and ran up the alley and set up the pins, and then ran back with the ball, in great haste. As he came back, he appeared to look directly at me, but gave no sign of having seen me. I scanned his face closely. He was blind. His hair and beard were black, and he had no eyebrows. The boy flung out his hands as if in despair, and cried: “It’s no use! You can’t do it! Forty-seven strikes to make by midnight! Oh, he’ll give you to Goolk the Spider! What shall I do? What shall I do?” “Perhaps I can help you,” said I, coming forward. The boy sprang up, and the Blind Bowler wheeled round toward me. “Oh! it’s you,” said the boy named Figli. “What can a peddler do against the Eyebrow?” “Who is it?” said the Blind Bowler. “It’s a stranger with eyebrows,” said Figli, “who was kind to me to-day.” The Blind Bowler sent a ball spinning up the alley, and all the ten pins fell down with a clatter. “A strike!” cried Figli, joyfully.