Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket. The bottle was full of a colourless liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn brighter and quickened his movements. Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river water. In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colourless fluid was druggist’s alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as “alki.” Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment, alarmed him ere he could drink. Placing the can carefully upon the ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously whatever impended. Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The new-comer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges. His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. In many places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, and joined him. “Hello, grandpa,” the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at the other’s flaring, sky-open nostril. “Say, Whiskers, how’d ye keep the night dew out of that nose o’ yourn?” Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question. “For the love of Mike,” the fat man chuckled, “if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you’d sure drown, wouldn’t you?” “Can it, Fatty, can it,” Whiskers muttered wearily. “They ain’t nothin’ new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me.” “But you can still drink, I hope”; Fatty at the same time mollified and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his bundle. From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.