Ray found himself in a jam of people who had begun suddenly to gather at the corner he was approaching. They were looking across at something on the other corner, and Ray looked too. Trunks and travelling-bags had overflowed from a store in the basement there, and piled themselves on the sidewalk and up the house wall; and against the background they formed stood two figures. One was a decent-looking young man in a Derby hat, and wearing spectacles, which gave him a sort of scholarly air; he remained passive in the grip of another, probably the shopman, who was quite colorless with excitement, and who clung fast to the shoulder of the first, as if his prisoner were making violent efforts to escape. A tall young policeman parted the crowd, and listened a moment to the complaint the shopman made, with many gestures toward his wares. Then he turned to the passive captive, and Ray heard the click of the handcuffs as they snapped on the wrists of this scholarly-looking man; and the policeman took him by the arm and led him away. The intrusion of such a brutal fact of life into the tragic atmosphere of his revery made the young poet a little sick, but the young journalist avidly seized upon it. The poet would not have dreamed of using such an incident, but the journalist saw how well it would work into the scheme of that first letter he was writing home to the _Echo_, where he treated of the surface contrasts of life in New York as they present themselves to the stranger. A glad astonishment at the profusion of the material for his letters possessed him; at this rate he should have no trouble in writing them; he could make them an indispensable feature; they would be quoted and copied, and he could get a rise out of Hanks Brothers on the price. He crossed to the next corner, where the shopman was the centre of a lessening number of spectators, and found him willing to prolong the interest he had created in the public mind. He said the thief had priced a number of bags in the place below, and on coming up had made a grab at one and tried to get off with it; but he was onto him like lightning. He showed Ray which bag it was, and turned it round and upside down as if with a fresh sense of its moral value. He said he should have to take that bag into court, and he set it aside so that he should not forget it. “I suppose,” said a tall, elderly gentleman, who seemed to have been listening to Ray’s dialogue with the shopman, “you wouldn’t be willing to sell me that bag?” He spoke slowly with a thick, mellow voice, deep in his throat. “Money wouldn’t buy that bag; no sir,” said the shopman; but he seemed uneasy. “You know,” urged the soft-voiced stranger, “you could show some other bag in court that was just like it.” “I couldn’t swear to no other bag,” said the shopman, daunted, and visibly relenting.