A man with a black, thick, filthy beard, black, bushed eyebrows beneath which glistened black eyes, a man with a nose inordinately long, falling sheer from his sooty brow, moved upon legs that carried him circularly, level, as if they were wheels ... moved about. He dipped his talonous hand into a refuse can: his shoulders swung like the walking-beam of a boat. He dipped the other hand. There was refuse in his hand. He put it in his mouth. He dove under benches; he ransacked the scanty grass; he sought refuse. He put it in his mouth. As he ate, his black eyes looked at Karl; they gleamed with a joy so full that Karl breathed against the glisten of his eyes sparking the air. A little man with a face ghostly white, lips red like a gash of blood soaking through chalk, a little man with up-pointed shoulders and sleeves that were tatters to the elbow, moved, isolate, intent; picking up scraps of paper. Each scrap his fingers feverishly smoothed, his lean eyes bent and read what was there to read. Then his fingers tossed the paper from his eyes behind his back ... eyes roaming, roaming to another scrap. As he read each message, his lips moved; as his lips moved they bled. A man wide as a hogshead, short as a boy, wider than long, black as black earth, a negro dwarf with a huge head sat with legs dangling from a bench and looked at Karl. Karl saw him. The dwarf raised a hand to his head and doffed his derby hat. Courteously he smiled, swinging his hat and his arm. He had white separate teeth and no lips. Beneath the frowze of his muddy trousers were patent leather boots. And they dangled. As he bowed, Karl knew that within the patent leather boots his toes were twitching. Karl sat easefully and still, and was not surprised to find beside him on the bench the bearded tramp whom he had seen so often, here and elsewhere, on his walks. The tramp had always interested him; he had always wondered what could be his story. But a terrible reticence, savage or divine, fended this shambling blond man who with great tender eyes, long beard and skin transparent, blue-veined, now sat beside him. This man, he felt, speaks to no one. There is an embryon word, yet dumb, sheathed by his presence. They had sat before in this park on a single bench; it had been impossible to touch his eyes. Slight and frail man beside him. Karl did not turn his head to look at him. By virtue of the four-stroked vision within which he dwelt, he saw him clear with his eyes beyond. He saw between the straight, blond beard and the arching forehead touched with delicate hair, a face young and worn. Sunken cheeks with blue shadows; blue eyes gleaming in red sick lids; a hidden mouth; a nose straight and fine and singularly sharp. He saw, lost within the aged suit of brown, a tenuous body, and at the hip beside him a huge excrescence ... a sort of tumor ... swelling the trouser leg which elsewhere hung in folds.