Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/27

 Aloysius McGillicuddy, the son of Patrick McGillicuddy, the driver of a brewery wagon, Irish, and a Catholic. His unfortunate mother was Annie Kirke, a servant, Scotch, and a Presbyterian. After her marriage she kept a boarding-house. The father had his son christened in the Catholic faith; the mother was determined that he should be a Presbyterian; and she had her way—after her husband tired of quarrels and deserted her—until the son followed in the father's footsteps. And young Jack McGillicuddy, under an assumed name that became "Owen Carey" finally, worked as an errand boy, as a shoe clerk, in a printer's office, in a press-room—in Toledo, in Chicago, in Boston—tramping, beating his way on freight-trains, working at anything temporary, even begging when he had—to an absurd, sensitive, eccentric young victim of his own intenseness, whose one consistent impression of mankind was its good-natured inhumanity.

That was why the whine of an animal affected him more than a human appeal. He had a fellow-feeling for the animal. So, to return to his October night in 1899—

He looked around for the dog, but he did not see any. He saw a woman sitting on one of the wet benches of the Square, and the whine seemed to come from her. He supposed that she had the dog on her lap.