Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and shouted. “O Will, come out here.” A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place. “Will you run it?” he asked. “Sure,” she said. “The kids can take care of themselves.” At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight. Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam’s arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten. The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder. “Hello, Mother,” he said heartily. The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the dining-room and pulled aside the curtains. “Come here, Joe,” she said. The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside, supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling into the dining-room.