Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches,they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.

　　At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square,for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

　　But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church,quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed,where,no doubt,the organist loitered over the keys,making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence.

　　The moon was above,lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrains were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves—for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence,for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.

　　The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled,the degraded days,unworthy desires,dead hopes,wrecked faculties,and base motives that made up his existence.