And the Yeah, Welcome everyone to another Oh of Oh Henry's in the early 1900s. You can easily picture the Irish cops on the beat, the street lights, the alleyways, and find out who strays, uptown or downtown, according to their lights.

And now our story, according to their lights, by O Henry.

I'm down and out, but I'm no traitor to a man that's been my friend.

The Captain's voice rose and boomed like a split trombone.

Get out of this park, Charlie Finnegan, where us thieves and tramps and boozers are your betters, and take your dirty money with you.

Somewhere in the depths of the big city, where the unquiet dregs are forever being shaken together,

young Murray and the captain had met and become friends.

Both were at the lowest ebb possible to their fortunes.

Both had fallen from at least an intermediate heaven of respectability and importance, and

both were typical products of the monstrous and peculiar social curriculum of their overweening and

bumsious civic alma mater. The captain was no longer a captain.

One of those sudden moral catacisms that sometimes sweep the city had hurled him from a high

and profitable position in the police department, ripping off his badge and buttons and washing into the hands of his lawyers the

solid pieces of real estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate.

The passing of the flood left him low and dry.

One month after his disabilities, a saloon keeper plucked him by the neck from his free lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest and cast him

asphalt's word. This seems low enough, but after that he acquired a pair of cloth top

button congress gators and wrote complaining letters to the newspapers.

And then he fought the attendant at the municipal lodging house who tried to give him a bath.

When Murray first saw him, he was holding a hand of an Italian woman who sold

apples and garlic on Essex Street and quoting the words of a songbook ballad.

Murray's fall had been more than Luciferian, if less spectacular.

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