CHAPTER 3.
Once every two months Maria Macapa set the entire flat in commotion.
She roamed the building from garret to cellar, searching each corner, ferreting through every old box and trunk and barrel, groping about on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the lodgers with her persistence and importunity.

She was collecting junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off garments.

It was one of her perquisites.

She sold the junk to Zerkow, the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents a pound.

The stone jugs, however, were worth a nickel.