In less time than it can be told, the actor, fearfully beaten, was partly dragged and partly kicked to the back window, and there was thrust bodily forth. A heavy thud outside told of a heavy fall. Manager Gorham turned from the window, wiping the blood from his hands upon his handkerchief, and looking about in sarcastic triumph at the crowd that had trampled upon his hat. Ned was astonished to observe that these men seemed to have forgotten their share in that little transaction, for several who had been most demonstrative in that expression of contempt spoke to Gorham now with earnest respectfulness, and in grave reprehension of the poor wretch whose sore bones lay out on the flagging in the alley. The manager gave a short, fierce, snort-like response, and as he turned abruptly he almost ran over Ned. "Get out of my way, boy, or I'll kill you!" he exclaimed irritably. Ned, roused to a realization of the situation, shrank back among the huge flats. It was only the general excitement which prevented his discovery. Gorham must have thought him one of the call-boys. Ned stole swiftly away from shadow to shadow, from flat to flat, till he reached his old retreat. He sprang into the chair and sat there panting, feeling much like a mouse regaining its hole after a perilous but successful tour of the pantry. The stage was again before him, all glitter and splendor. The play of Hamlet--that subtlest delineation of the subtlest character ever conceived by the mind of man--was once more in its triumphal progress. The audience hung breathless on every word. Ned cared now for none of it. He was discouraged,--cast down. He was still young and ingenuous enough to be grieved by those contemptible phases of human nature exhibited in the manager, when he so brutally proved himself the master in his own house, in the truckling spirit of the crowd, in the degradation and coarse vice of the actor, the forlorn "first player." As to himself--he too was much to blame. He was pierced with a full realization of the wickedness of his presence here. "My mother would call it _stealin'_, an' nothin' shorter," he said, remembering her homely, direct phrase. Then he had a vivid mental picture of her. He knew that again and again she was going down the long steep flights of stairs to the street door to peer into the dark thoroughfare, wondering at his continued absence, and trembling to think of the many temptations that lead a boy to crime in a great city. Whatever may be the beneficial educational effects of seeing the play of Hamlet from the gallery, they are certainly lacking in a view stolen from the wings, with fifty cents heavy on the conscience, nothing at all on the stomach, a great and growing dread of discovery, and a morbid presentiment that something terrible is about to happen.