It was only a few days later that Collins, attempting to jump the bumpers of a moving freight, missed his footing on the ice-sheathed metal and fell. He was badly crushed and died before he was found. There was no one to mourn him. The kid and he had since quarrelled and parted company. But he earned a front-page story the next day in a great metropolitan daily. A shrewd reporter had come into possession of his precious letter, and it appeared in full, verbatim, under the title “Tramp Dies with Unmailed Letter to Mother.” And many eyes in the great city blinked for a moment with suspicious moisture when they read. And several wanderers on the face of the earth recalled with a start the long time it had been since they had written their mothers.

Some of these, with the story still before them, half unconsciously reached for their cheque-books. And that evening before the type metal which had stamped the story on their awakened memories had been melted to be shaped again into the next day’s murder, grand ball, or clothing advertisement, a little fund had been raised to save what remained of Collins from the Potters’ Field.

So it came to pass on the following afternoon, a forlorn little undertaking “parlour” was made sadly gay with flowers from nameless givers, while “Spieler” Hanks, the leathern-lunged street-evangelist, said a few words above Collins’ coffin in a voice strangely modulated.

When the kid many miles down the line read the account of this unusual occasion in a tattered, battered, week-old edition, borrowed from a brakie, he drew his hand across his tobacco-stained mouth and grunted in amazement.

“For de love o’ Mike! Dat guy couldn’t quit kiddin’ even when he croaked. A whole town full o’ weepin’ nuts is just fallin’ all over demselves paying respects to dat good-for-nothin’ old hobo. Oh, Collins? Oh, boy!”

And he slapped his leg and went off into a paroxysm of laughter.