What is the noun for beg?

Which phrase in this excerpt from james joyce's "araby is a participial phrase? north richmond street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the christian brothers' school set the boys free. an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. the other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces the former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. among these i found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: the abbot, by walter scott, the devout communicant and the memoirs of vidocq. i liked yellow. the wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which i found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. he had been a very charitable priest, in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

"dogs make wonderful pets because they us stay happy and healthy"the topic sentence is "dogs make wonderful pets" i need writing a sentence that is unrelated to the topic and can be eliminated.

What is the central idea of paragraph 1 of the story?