“Leave the boy here,” said I at last, “I'll find him work to live by, if it be no more than sitting outside my door, and playing the usher to those who call upon me.” “Melting Moses is the only name he has given me,” said the Reverend Bronson, as he took his leave. “I suppose, if one might get to it, that he has another.” “Melting Moses, as a name, should do very well,” said I. Melting Moses looked wistfully after the Reverend Bronson when the latter departed, and I could tell by that how the urchin regretted the going of the dominie as one might regret the going of an only friend. Somehow, the lad's forlorn state grew upon me, and I made up my mind to serve as his protector for a time at least. He was a shrill child of the Bowery, was Melting Moses, and spoke a kind of gutter dialect, one-half slang and the other a patter of the thieves that was hard to understand. My first business was to send him out with the janitor of the building to have him thrown into a bathtub, and then buttoned into a new suit of clothes. Melting Moses submitted dumbly to these improvements, being rather resigned than pleased, and later with the same docility went home to sleep at the janitor's house. Throughout the day he would take up his post on my door and act as herald to what visitors might come. Being washed and combed and decently arrayed, Melting Moses, with black eyes and a dark elfin face, made no bad figure of a boy. For all his dwarfishness, I found him surprisingly strong, and as active as a monkey. He had all the love and loyalty of a collie for me, and within the first month of his keeping my door, he would have cast himself into the river if I had asked him for that favor. Little by little, scrap by scrap, Melting Moses gave me his story. Put together in his words, it ran like this: “Me fadder kept a joint in Kelly's Alley; d' name of-d' joint was d' Door of Death, see! It was a hot number, an' lots of trouble got pulled off inside. He used to fence for d' guns an' dips, too, me fadder did; an' w'en one of 'em nipped a super or a rock, an' wanted d' quick dough, he brought it to me fadder, who chucked down d' stuff an' no questions asked. One day a big trick comes off--a jooeler's winder or somet'ing like dat. Me fadder is in d' play from d' outside, see! An' so w'en dere's a holler, he does a sneak an' gets away, 'cause d' cops is layin' to pinch him. Me fadder gets put wise to this be a mug who hangs out about d' Central Office. He sherries like I says.