“When the order come to the flats that all hands must turn out and sleep in the park, according to the instructions of the consulting committee of the City Club and the Murphy Draying, Returfing and Sodding Company, there was a look of a couple of fires and an eviction all over the place.

“The tenants began to pack up feather beds, rubber boots, strings of garlic, hot-water bags, portable canoes and scuttles of coal to take along for the sake of comfort.  The sidewalk looked like a Russian camp in Oyama’s line of march.  There was wailing and lamenting up and down stairs from Danny Geoghegan’s flat on the top floor to the apartments of Missis Goldsteinupski on the first.

“‘For why,’ says Danny, coming down and raging in his blue yarn socks to the janitor, ’should I be turned out of me comfortable apartments to lay in the dirty grass like a rabbit?  ’Tis like Jerome to stir up trouble wid small matters like this instead of—­’

“‘Whist!’ says Officer Reagan on the sidewalk, rapping with his club.  ’’Tis not Jerome.  ’Tis by order of the Polis Commissioner.  Turn out every one of yez and hike yerselves to the park.’

“Now, ’twas a peaceful and happy home that all of us had in them same Beersheba Flats.  The O’Dowds and the Steinowitzes and the Callahans and the Cohens and the Spizzinellis and the McManuses and the Spiegelmayers and the Joneses—­all nations of us, we lived like one big family together.  And when the hot nights come along we kept a line of children reaching from the front door to Kelly’s on the corner passing along the cans of beer from one to another without the trouble of running after it.  And with no more clothing on than is provided for in the statutes, sitting in all the windies, with a cool growler in every one, and your feet out in the air, and the Rosenstein girls singing on the fire-escape of the sixth floor, and Patsy Rourke’s flute going in the eighth, and the ladies calling each other synonyms out the windie, and now and then a breeze sailing in over Mister Depew’s Central—­I tell you the Beersheba Flats was a summer resort that made the Catskills look like a hole in the ground.  With his person full of beer and his feet out the windy and his old woman frying pork chops over a charcoal furnace and the childher dancing in cotton slips on the sidewalk around the organ-grinder and the rent paid for a week—­what does a man want better on a hot night than that?  And then comes this ruling of the polis driving people out o’ their comfortable homes to sleep in parks—­’twas for all the world like a ukase of them Russians—­’twill be heard from again at next election time.

“Well, then, Officer Reagan drives the whole lot of us to the park and turns us in by the nearest gate.  ’Tis dark under the trees, and all the children sets up to howling that they want to go home.