The sparrows usually brought him back. They played about his feet; they chirped, hopped, and tattled; they peered side-ways at him and gave him jerky nods of greeting. At times one of them, to a sudden inspiration, sprang into the air; with a whir he flashed up to the top of a tree. To the movement, something within Charles-Norton leaped to his throat. Across the park, gaunt behind the trees, rose the tall steel frame of a new building; and away up at the top of it (which was higher every day) a workingman, on a girder, ate his lunch. Charles-Norton liked this man; a current of comradeship always ran from him to the little figure silhouetted up against the blue. He should have liked to eat his lunch up there, side by side with this man, his legs swinging next to his, with the void beneath. And then, he thought, after lunching, he would like to stand erect, away up there, at the tip edge of one of the projecting beams; to stand there a bit, and then spring off; spring off lightly, and whiz down; down, down, down with outspread arms. Which was a very foolish thought for a man that worked in a cage to dream. Very foolish, even if the cage were of glass. Just about that time the Pippin went out in a black smolder, and from a nearby church, hidden between great sky-scrapers, a big ding-dong bell said resonantly that it was half-past one. He returned to the office. Every afternoon, now, was a tingling trial. He worked with head down, sweating with repression. An obsession tormented him. He wanted to walk out of his glass cage. Out, not through the door, but through the glass. Not gently, like Alice going into Wonderland, but with ostentation and violence, with a heralding crash of shattered panes, scandalously. Out of his cage, into the next; out of that, into the next; from one end of the big room, in fact, to the other, crashingly, through cage after cage--and then out upon the street through the plate front. Half-past five finally freed him; and taking his place in a packed herring-box on wheels, he was rolled back to Dolly--and the shearing. Thus for a while did the young people live securely on a clown's tissue-paper hoop. Then one evening, just as Charles-Norton, after successfully resisting all day his anarchistic glass-smashing impulse, was watching the hands of the clock approach the minute that was to free him, his chief, raising his bald head at the end of his long, thin neck, said casually, "We work all night, to-night, you know, Mr. Sims." CHAPTER VII "We work all night to-night, Mr. Sims." It is always with just such a sentence, quiet, drab, and seemingly insignificant, that Mr. Catastrophe introduces himself. "Yes?" said Charles-Norton, adjusting his neck-tie and looking at the calendar. He was not surprised, for this happened twice a year. Twice a year, on a day in December and a day in June, a part of the force worked all night to prepare a statistical table for the benefit of the stockholders.