“I’ll show him whether he’ll hit me,” insists the injured man, entering the house. The woman follows, and then the short, thickset man from the street. One after another they disappear up the narrow stairs which begin at the back of the hall. Some of the crowd follows, myself included. Presently, after a great deal of scuffling and hustling on the fourth floor, all return helter-skelter. They are followed by a large, comfortably-built, healthy, white-shirted Irish-American, who lives up there and who has strength and courage. Before him, pathetically small in size and strength, the others move, the mutilated and still protesting victim among them. Apparently he has been ejected from the room in which he had been before. “I’ll show him,” he is still boasting. “I’ll see whether he’ll hit me with a banister leg, the ----.” “That’s all right,” says the large Irishman with a brogue, pushing him gently onto the sidewalk as he does so. “Go on now.” “I’ll get even with him yet,” insists the victim. “That’s all right. I don’t care what you do to-morrow. Go on now.” The victim turns and looks up at this new authority fixedly, as though he knew him well, scratches his head and then turns and solemnly walks away. The other man does likewise. You wonder why. “It’s over now,” says the new authority to the crowd, and he smiles as blandly as if he had been taking part in an entertainment of some kind. The crowd begins to dissolve. The man who drew the banister leg or stick and who was to have been punished has also disappeared. “But how is this?” I ask of some one. “How can he do that?” “Him?” replies an Irish longshoreman who seems to wish to satisfy my curiosity. “Don’t you know who that is? It’s Patsy Finnerty. He used to be a champeen prize-fighter. He won all the fights around here ten years ago. Everybody knows him. He’s in charge over at the steamship dock now, but they won’t fight with him. If they did he wouldn’t give ’em no more work. They both work for him once in a while.” I see it all in a blinding flash and go to my own room. How much more powerful is self-interest as typified by Patsy than the police! * * * * * It is raining one night and I hear a voice in the room above mine, singing. It is a good voice, sweet and clear, but a little weak and faint down here. “Tyro-al, Tyro-al! Tyro-al, Tyro-al! Ich hab dich veeder, O mine Tyro-al!” I know who lives up there by now: Mr. and Mrs. Schmick and a little Schmick girl, about ten or eleven. Being courageous in this vicinity because of the simplicity of these people, the awe they have for one who holds himself rather aloof and dresses better than they, and lonely, too, I go up. In response to my knock a little fair-complexioned, heavily constructed German woman with gray hair and blue eyes comes to the door. “I heard some one singing,” I say, “and I thought I would come up and ask you if I might not come in and listen. I live in the room below.”