Tales of Mean Streets

All this while nobody watched closely enough to note that the parcels brought in were fewer than the parcels taken out. Even a hand-truck, late one evening, went unremarked: the...

Lizerunt, delighted but derisive, ended with a promise to "see." The bloke had come at last, and she walked home with the feeling of having taken her degree. She had half assure...

Seized by a fit of shuddering breaths, Lizer sank on the floor, and, with her head across the body, presently broke into a storm of hysterical blubbering, while Billy, white and...

The service ended. The congregation trooped forth into the evening; but Scuddy sat where he was, for the preacher wanted a few words with his converts ere he would let them go....

A man by the door vomited his liquor: whereat was more hilarity, and his neighbors, with many yaups, shoved further up the middle. But one of the little ones, standing before he...

So it stood when, on a certain morning, Bill being minded to go out, found but two shillings in his pocket. He called upstairs to the missis, as was his custom in such a pass, a...

And Sotcher's discourse at the Red Cow turned, lightly and easily, toward the question of explosives. Anybody could make them, he explained; nothing simpler, with care. And here...

The dinner hour had gone by before the full inner meaning had been wrested from this letter. "B. Napper deceased" Bill accepted, with a little assistance, as an announcement of...

"'Ave a drop o' beer," said one of Neddy's new-won friends, extending a tankard. He took it, though he scarcely felt awake. He was listless and weak, and would not have moved fo...

NOTE.--_The greater number of these stories and studies were first printed in_ The National Observer; _the introduction, in a slightly different form, in_ Macmillan's Magazine;...

"Ho!" rejoined the speaker, mincingly. "There's a gent there as seems to want to address this 'ere meetin'. P'r'aps you'll 'ave the kindness to step up 'ere, my friend, an' say...