d’œuvre_ of the bizarre or the grotesque or the mad, had made something as strange and unaccountable as a great genius or a great master of men. Only it had worked at the other extreme from public efficiency or smug, conventional public interest, and had produced a singular variation, inefficient, unsocial, eccentric or evil, as you choose, qualities which worked to exclude the subject of the variation from any participation in what we are pleased to call a normal life. I am thinking, for instance, of a long, lean faced, unkempt and bedraggled woman, not exceptionally old, but roughened and hardened by what circumstances I know not into a kind of horse, whom once of an early winter’s morning I encountered at Broadway and Fourteenth Street pushing a great rattletrap of a cart in which was piled old rags, sacks, a chair, a box and what else I know not, and all this with long, lean strides and a kind of determined titan energy toward the North River. Her body was clad in a mere semblance of clothing, rags which hung limp and dirty and close to her form and seemingly wholly insufficient for the bitter weather prevailing at the time. Her hair was coarse and iron-gray, done in a shapeless knot and surmounted by something in the shape of a small hat which might have been rescued from an ashheap. Her eyes were fixed, glassy almost, and seemingly unseeing. Here she came, vigorous, stern, pushing this tatterdemalion cart, and going God knows where. I followed to see and saw her enter, finally, a wretched, degraded west side slum, in a rear yard of which, in a wretched tumble-down tenement, which occupied a part of it, she appeared to have a room or floor. But what days and years of chaffering, think you, were back of this eventual result, what years of shabby dodging amid the giant legs of circumstances? To grow out of childhood--once really soft, innocent childhood--into a thing like this, an alley-scraping horse--good God! And then the men. What a curious company they are, just those few who stand out in my memory, whom, from a mere passing opportunity to look upon, I have never been able to forget.