CHAPTER VII.--THE PITT STREET STRINGENCY. Another would-be sooicide, eh! Here, Kid,” to a sharp gamin who does errands and odd commissions for the house; “take this mut in where dey kills ’em.” The speaker is a loud young man, clad in garments of violence. The derby tilted over eye, the black cigar jutting ceilingward at an agle of sixty degrees, the figured shirt whereof a dominating dye is angry red, the high collar and flash tie, with its cheap stone, all declare the Bowery. As if to prove the proposition announced of his costume, the young man is perched on a stool, the official ticket-seller of a Bowery theatre. Mike Menares, whom the Bowery person alludes to as the “mut,” is a square-shouldered boy of eighteen; handsome he is as Apollo, yet with a slow, good-humored guilelessness of face. He has come on business bent. That mighty pugilist, the Dublin Terror, is nightly on the stage, offering two hundred dollars to any amateur among boxers who shall remain before him four Queensberry rounds. Mike Menares, he of the candidly innocent countenance, desires to proffer himself as a sacrifice. “Youse is just in time, sport,” remarks the brisk gamin to whom Mike has been committed, as he pilots the guileless one to the stage door. “It’s nine o’clock now, an’ d’ Terror goes on to do his bag-t’umpin’ turn at ten. After that comes d’ knockin’ out, see! But say! if youse was tired of livin’, why didn’t you jump in d’ East river? I’d try d’ river an’d’ morgue before I’d come here to be murdered be d’ Terror.” Mike makes no retort to this, lacking lightness of temper. His gamin conductor throws open the stage door and signals Mike to enter. “Tell d’ butcher here’s another calf for him,” vouchsafes the gamin to the stage-hands inside the door. Let us go back four hours to a three-room tenement in Pitt Street. There are two rooms and a little kennel of a kitchen. The furnishings are rough and cheap and clean. The lady of the tenement, as the floors declare, is a miracle of soap and water. And the lady is little Mollie Lacy, aged eleven years. The family of the Pitt Street tenement is made up of three. There is Mike Menares, our hero; little Mollie; and, lastly, her brother Davy, aged nine. Little Davy is lame. He fell on the tenement stairs four years before and injured his hip. The hospital doctors took up the work where the tenement stairs left off, and Davy came from his sick-bed doomed to a crutch for life. Mike Menares is half-brother of the younger ones. Nineteen years before, Mike’s mother, Irish, with straw-colored hair and blue eyes, wedded one Menares, a Spanish Jew. This fortunate Menares was a well-looking, tall man; with hair black and stiffening in a natural pompadour. He kept a tobacco stall underneath a stair in Park Row, and was accounted rich by the awfully poor about him. He died, however, within the year following Mike’s birth; and thus there was an end to the rather thoroughbred dark Spanish Jew.