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By Root 10466 0

go through his mind; just sit and dream, and realize that life was a funny thing, but that he’d fought his way up to a station where there weren’t no real serious problems like poverty, and he sits there, and is comfortable and content and patient, because he knows that he has put his shoulder to the wheel, and he has been a good Catholic, and a good American, a good father, and a good husband. He just sits there with Mary, and smokes and his cigar, and has his thoughts, and then, after it dark, he can send one of the kids for ice cream, or maybe sneak down to the saloon at Fifty-eighth and State and have a glass of beer. But there was many another evening for that, and tonight he’d have to go and see the kids get a good sendoff; otherwise he wouldn’t be much of a father. When you’re a father you got duties, and Patrick J. Lonigan well knew that.

While Lonigan’s attention had been sunk inwards, the kids had all left the playground. Now he looked about, and the scene was swallowed in a hush, broken only by occasional automobiles and by the noise from the State Street cars that seemed to be more than a block away. Suddenly, he experienced, like an unexpected blow, a sharp fear of growing old and dying, and he knew a moment of terror. Then it slipped away, greased by the thickness of his content. Where in hell should he get the idea that he was getting so old? Sure, he was a little gray in the top story, and a little fat around the belly, but, well, the fat was a healthy fat, and there was lots of stuff left in the old boy. And he was not any fatter than old man O’Brien who owned the coal yards at Sixty-second and Wabash.

He puffed at his stogy and flicked the ashes over the railing. He thought about his own family. Bill would get himself some more education, and then learn the business, starting as a painter’s apprentice, and when he got the hang of things and had worked on the job long enough, he would step in and run the works; and then the old man and Mary would take a trip to the old sod and see where John McCormack was born, take a squint at the Lakes of Killarney, kiss the blarney stone, and look up all his relatives. He sang to himself, so that no one would hear him:

Where the dear old Shannon’s flowing,

Where the three-leaved shamrock grows,

Where my heart is I am going,

To my little Irish Rose.

And the moment that I meet her,

With a hug and kiss 1’11 greet her,

For there’s not a colleen sweeter,

Where the River Shannon flows.

He glowed over the fact that his kids were springing up. Martin and Loretta were coming along faster than he could imagine. Frances was going to be a beautiful girl who’d attract some rich and sensible young fellow. He beat up a number of imaginary villains who would try to ruin her. He returned to the thought that his kids were growing up; and he rested in the assurance that they had all gotten the right start; they would turn out A No. 1.

Martin would be a lawyer or professional man of some kind; he might go into politics and become a senator or a... you never could tell what a lad with the blood of Paddy Lonigan in him might not become. And Loretta, he just didn’t know what she’d be, but there was plenty of time for that. Anyway, there was going to be no hitches in the future of his kids. And the family would have to be moving soon. When he’d bought this building, Wabash Avenue had been a nice, decent, respectable street for a self-respecting man to live with his family. But now, well, the niggers and kikes were getting in, and they were dirty, and you didn’t know but what, even in broad day-light, some nigger moron might be attacking his girls. He’d have to get away from the eight balls and tinhorn kikes. And when they got into a neighborhood property values went blooey. He’d sell and get out... and when he did, he was going to get a pretty penny on the sale.

He puffed away. A copy of the Chicago Evening Journal was lying at his side. It was the only decent paper in town; the rest were Republican. And he hated the Questioner, because it hadn’t supported Joe O’Reilley, past grand