Upon arriving at No. 17 McBurney Place, and having climbed two flights of stairs, the door of her studio was opened before she could lay hand to the knob, and a very small boy with very big eyes, and no more flesh upon his bones than served to distinguish him from a living skeleton, appeared on the threshold, smiling, you may say, from head to foot. He was dressed in a blue suit with bobbed tails and a double row of bright brass buttons down the front, and when she had gathered him from the gutter in which he had reached to his present stunted stature, a child half gone in pneumonia, he had told her that his name, his whole name, was "Bubbles" and nothing but "Bubbles." "Good morning, Miss Barbara," he said; "the plumber's bin and gone, and the feller from the hardware store has swore hell be around before noon to fix the new knobs in the doors." "Good!" said Barbara. "Well done, Bubbles." And she passed into the studio, wondering why a little face all knotting with smiles, affection, and the pleasure of commands lovingly received and well obeyed, should remind her of that other face, massive, sardonic, lost, satanic, which had looked up into hers across the battered tin cup on the top of a battered street-organ. She turned to a little clay head that she had made recently and for which Bubbles had sat; touched it here and there, stepped back from it, turned her own head to the left, to the right, and even, such was the concentration of her mood, showed between her red lips the tip of a still redder tongue. But no matter what she did to test and undo her first impression there persisted between the two faces a certain likeness, though in just what this resemblance consisted she was unable to say. "Bubbles," she said, "you were telling me about beggars the other day and how much they make, and how rich some of them are. Did you ever run across one that sells shoe-laces, plays a hand-organ, and hasn't got any legs?" "Sure," said he; "there's half a dozen in the city." And he named them. "Burbage: he's the real thing, got his legs took off by a cannon-ball in the wars. Prior: he ain't no 'count. Drunk and fell under a elevated train. He ain't saved nothing neither. He drinks _his_. Echmeyer: he's some Jew; worth every cent of fifty thousand dollars. They calls him congen_eye_tul, 'cause he was born with his legs lef off him. Fun Barnheim: he's German, went asleep in the shade of a steam-roller, and never woke up till his legs was rolled out flat as a pair of pants that's just bin ironed. Then o' course there's Blizzard." Barbara was smiling. "What became of his _legs_, Bubbles?" "God knows," returned the boy. "Blizzard don't boast about it like the others. But he ain't no common beggar. He's a man." "A good man?" "Good? He ain't got a kinder thought in his block than settin' fire to houses and killin' people. But when he says 'step,' _it_ steps." "It?" "The East Side, Miss Barbara. He's the whole show." "What does he look like?"