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wringing a handkerchief into a coiled knot. Crying out one’s business is a useful if deafening practice. Everyone from milk vendors to scissors grinders screams their professions from the sides of the road. “A quick little mite, very neat and nimble.”
    “Where was he stationed?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “I won’t say.”
    “But you must, Grace,” Turley exclaimed.
    “No. You can’t send him to the House of Refuge, Mr. Wilde. He’d not live through it, and I don’t think he understands. I’ll not use him again, I promise.”
    Children guilty of vagrancy or criminal acts are meant to be sent by copper stars to the House of Refuge. I’ve flouted this order upward of a hundred times in my short six-month tenure, as I’m not of the opinion that cat-o’-nine-tails improve kinchins’ character. A session with one certainly didn’t enhance my brother’s moral stamina. Whenever I think of how close my little friend Bird Daly came to being buried behind those stone walls at the behest of Madam Silkie Marsh, the old jolt of fear still echoes through my chest. If I could raze that institution to the ground, I’d consider my life to have been a parade-worthy success.
    “I would never send any kinchin to the House of Refuge,” I said grimly. “Where did you find the lad?”
    “Don’t make me say it. He’s not quite right, but he’s—”
    “I’d sooner cut my arm off than send a child to the House of Refuge,” I vowed, my hand over my copper star. “Please, Grace. Where does he cry his work?”
    Grace stared back with wide, fierce eyes. I think if she could have taken a damp cloth and wiped the answer clean from her mind, she’d have done it. She’d no earthly reason to trust me. But she’d no guarantee I wouldn’t throw her in the bowels of the Tombs for disobeying me either. Finally, she answered, “God help him. He stands at the corner of Eighteenth and Third Avenue, the poor boy. God keep him from harm.”
    Grace’s throat sounded as if it were grinding glass, and
harm
meant
that horrible copper star in front of me.
So I said, as Piest and I turned away, “I’ve no proof, you know. I only want to talk to him.”
    A humorless laugh flew from Grace’s mouth. “That you’ll never do.”
    “Why not?” Mr. Piest inquired.
    “You’ll see,” she said.
    Then she buried her face in Turley’s coat, her body wracked with deep sobs that made me understand something I hadn’t before.
    I wasn’t the first copper star Grace had encountered. Or perhaps heard tell of. Something about us frightened her, yes, but it was the distinct, explicit breed of something. I wondered with a ticklish sensation in my chest what it was, but she was clearly now past speech. Grace’s tears, and Turley’s hushed words of comfort, followed us as we quit the corridor, and above us the skies sharpened to a wicked shade of steel.

three
    He asked, “Are ye a slave for life?” I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life . . . They both advised me to run away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should be free.
    —FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE
,
1845
    W
e soon reached
Third Avenue.
A tensely snapped gust like the crack of a driving whip blew up the street. Third is a vast swath of McAdamized roadway, much more pastoral and less shielded by tall buildings than is Fifth. It teemed with people, for Third is one of our headiest driving courses. Omnibuses rumbled toward the Twenty-seventh Street depot, hardened American dead rabbits whizzed by in pleasure traps, and swells took their ease in carriages with gaily painted bodies that looked like so many tropical birds. Every so often, a driver would glance up at the sky. Curious as to how far he could make it before the air was pale with snow.
    “I