He came to himself and stood; lumps of coal clattered down the pile. He stepped out of the bin and was surprised to see an electric bulb suspended above his head. Why had not the old man turned the light on? Oh! He understood: The old man had shoveled coal into this furnace for so many years that he had no need for light; he had lived within the narrow grooves of habit so long that he had learned to see in his dark world without the aid of eyes, like those sightless worms that inch along underground by a sense of touch.

He switched on the light and his eyes fell upon a lunch pail. He was afraid to hope that it was full. He picked it up; it was heavy. He opened it. Sandwiches! He glanced around; he was alone. The old man can buy some more, he mumbled. He searched farther and found a paper of matches and a half-empty tin of tobacco. He put the matches and tobacco eagerly into his pocket, clicked off the light; holding the lunch pail under his arm, he went through the door, groped the pile of coal and stood again in the basement of the undertaking establishment. Feeling and seeing with his fingers, he opened the lunch pail and ripped off a piece of paper bag and brought out the tin and spilled grains of tobacco—a lot of it tumbled over his fingers and was lost—evenly and slowly into the makeshift concave of paper. He put the tin away and carefully folded the paper around the tobacco and wet it with spittle. His mouth watered in anticipation. He inserted the clumsy cigarette into his mouth and lit it and sucked acrid smoke that bit his lungs and made his eyes water. He felt the effect of the nicotine as it reached upward to his brain and outward along his arms to his fingertips and down to his stomach and loins and along all the tired nerves of his body.

With lumpish cigarette slanting in flexed lips, he groped and re-entered the hole he had dug and lowered himself once more to the floor of the basement of the theatre. A cunning idea was in his mind. Why could he not crouch behind the coal pile and tunnel another hole into another basement? Good! He fumbled forward and felt a wall and poked at it with the screwdriver and the cement crumbled a bit and at once his eagerness was whetted. If he loosened enough of these bricks, what would he see? Where could he go? What would he find?