Toying with fate

“Move on, old man, and go home!”

It was the stern voice of one of New York’s finest policemen that uttered these words.

“Home! I wonder where it is?” muttered the old man to whom the policeman had spoken, and a shudder ran through his frame, as he slowly moved down the street.

As he reached the corner near old St. John’s Church, on Varick Street, he paused, rubbed his eyes and gazed dreamily around him.

For some time before the policeman had addressed him he had been standing inside the church, looking through the railings into the churchyard.

His form was bent by decrepitude and sorrow, and his hair was as white as the flaky snow that clung to the steeple of the old church, the bells of which had just sounded the knell of the dying year.