He grabbed me up excitedly, regardless of the fact that I had not finished my breakfast, and was still clinging to a half-eaten banana.  Tucking me under his arm, he went clattering down the steep attic stairs, calling Elsie to follow.  Running across the upper hall, he slid down the banister of the next flight of stairs, that being the quickest way to reach the front door and the street.  Elsie was close behind.  She slid down the banister after him, her chubby legs held stiffly out at each side, and the buttons on her jacket making a long zigzag scratch under her, as she shot down the dark, polished rail.

A crowd of children had stopped on the curbstone in front of the house, shivering a little in the pale autumn sunshine, but laughing and pushing each other as they gathered closer around the man with the hand-organ.  As the wheezy notes were ground out, the man unwound the rope that was coiled around his wrist, and bade the monkey at the other end of it step out and dance.

“Come on, Dago!  Come shake hands with the other monkey!” the children cried.  But I shrank back as far as possible, clinging to Phil’s neck.  Not for a fortune would I have touched the miserable little animal crouching on the organ.  She might have been Matches’s own sister, from her resemblance to her.  She belonged to the same species, I am sure, and whenever they held me near her I shrieked and scolded so fiercely that Phil finally said that I shouldn’t be teased.

The man who held the string was a hard master.  One could plainly see that.  He had a dark, cruel face, and he jerked the rope and swore at her in Italian whenever she stopped dancing, which she did every few seconds.  He had started on his rounds early, in order to attract as many children as possible before school-time, and I doubt if the poor little thing had had any breakfast.  She was sick besides.  She would dance a few steps and then cower down and tremble, and look at him so appealingly, that only a brute could have had the heart to strike her as he did.  When he found that all his jerking was in vain, he gave her several hard blows with the other end of the rope.  At that she staggered up and began to dance again, but it was not long until she was huddled down on the curbstone as before, shaking as if with a chill.

Oh, how I wished that I could be a human being for a few minutes!  A big strong man with a rope in my hands, and that fellow tied to one end of it.  Wouldn’t I make him dance?  Wouldn’t I jerk him and scold him and beat him, and give him a taste of how it feels to be a helpless animal, sick and suffering, in the power of a great ugly brute like himself?

Maybe he would not have been so rough if he had known that any one besides the children was looking on.  He did not see the gentleman standing at the open front door across the street, watching him with a frown on his face.  He did not see him, as I did, walk back into the hall and turn the crank of an alarm-signal.  But in less than two minutes, it seemed to me, that same gentleman was coming across the street with the policeman he had summoned.  A few words passed between them, and almost before the children knew what was happening, the policeman had the organ-grinder by the arm, and was marching him off down the street.  The gentleman who had caused the arrest followed with the poor trembling monkey.