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The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7410 · 647,250 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7410]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MINISTER'S CHARGE; OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER ***




Produced by Anne Folland, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








THE MINISTER'S CHARGE

OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER


By William Dean Howells


Author Of “The Rise Of Silas Lapham,” “A Modern Instance,” “Indian
Summer,” Etc.





THE MINISTER'S CHARGE;

OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER.




I.


On their way back to the farm-house where they were boarding, Sewell's
wife reproached him for what she called his recklessness. “You had no
right,” she said, “to give the poor boy false hopes. You ought to have
discouraged him--that would have been the most merciful way--if you knew
the poetry was bad. Now, he will go on building all sorts of castles
in the air on your praise, and sooner or later they will come tumbling
about his ears--just to gratify your passion for saying pleasant things
to people.”

“I wish you had a passion for saying pleasant things to me, my dear,”
 suggested her husband evasively.

“Oh, a nice time I should have!”

“I don't know about _your_ nice time, but I feel pretty certain of my
own. How do you know--Oh, _do_ get up, you implacable cripple!” he broke
off to the lame mare he was driving, and pulled at the reins.

“Don't saw her mouth!” cried Mrs. Sewell.

“Well, let her get up, then, and I won't. I don't like to saw her
mouth; but I have to do something when you come down on me with your
interminable consequences. I dare say the boy will never think of my
praise again. And besides, as I was saying when this animal interrupted
me with her ill-timed attempts at grazing, how do you know that I knew
the poetry was bad?”

“How? By the sound of your voice. I could tell you were dishonest in the
dark, David.”

“Perhaps the boy knew that I was dishonest too,” suggested Sewell.

“Oh no, he didn't. I could see that he pinned his faith to every
syllable.”

“He used a quantity of pins, then; for I was particularly profuse of
syllables. I find that it requires no end of them to make the worse
appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you. But
come, now, Lucy, let me off a syllable or two. I--I have a conscience,
you know well enough, and if I thought--But pshaw! I've merely cheered a
lonely hour for the boy, and he'll go back to hoeing potatoes to-morrow,
and that will be the end of it.”

“I _hope_ that will be the end of it,” said Mrs. Sewell, with the
darkling reserve of ladies intimate with the designs of Providence.

“Well,” argued her husband, who was trying to keep the matter from being
serious, “perhaps he may turn out a poet yet. You never can tell where
the lightning is going to strike. He has some idea of rhyme, and some
perception of reason, and--yes, some of the lines _were_ musical. His
general attitude reminded me of Piers Plowman. Didn't he recall Piers
Plowman to you?”

“I'm glad you can console yourself in that way, David,” said his wife
relentlessly.

The mare stopped again, and Sewell looked over his shoulder at the
house, now black in the twilight, on the crest of the low hill across
the hollow behind them. “I declare,” he said, “the loneliness of that
place almost broke my heart. There!” he added, as the faint sickle
gleamed in the sky above the roof, “I've got the new moon right over my
left shoulder for my pains. That's what comes of having a sympathetic
nature.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The boy was looking at the new moon, across the broken gate which
stopped the largest gap in the tumbled stone wall. He still gripped in
his hand the manuscript which he had been reading to the minister.

“There, Lem,” called his mother's voice from the house, “I guess you've
seen the last of 'em for one while. I'm 'fraid you'll take cold out
there 'n the dew. Come in, child.”

The boy obeyed. “I was looking at the new moon, mother. I saw it over my
right shoulder. Did you hear--hear him,” he asked, in a broken and husky
voice,--“hear how he praised my poetry, mother?”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Oh, _do_ make her get up, David!” cried Mrs. Sewell. “These mosquitoes
are eating me alive!”

“I will saw her mouth all to the finest sort of kindling-wood, if she
doesn't get up this very instant,” said Sewell, jerking the reins
so wildly that the mare leaped into a galvanic canter, and continued
without further urging for twenty paces. “Of course, Lucy,” he resumed,
profiting by the opportunity for conversation which the mare's temporary
activity afforded, “I should feel myself greatly to blame if I thought I
had gone beyond mere kindness in my treatment of the poor fellow. But at
first I couldn't realise that the stuff was so bad. Their saying that
he read all the books he could get, and was writing every spare moment,
gave me the idea that he _must_ be some sort of literary genius in
the germ, and I listened on and on, expecting every moment that he was
coming to some passage with a little lift or life in it; and when he got
to the end, and hadn't come to it, I couldn't quite pull myself together
to say so. I had gone there so full of the wish to recognise and
encourage, that I couldn't turn about for the other thing. Well! I
shall know another time how to value a rural neighbourhood report of the
existence of a local poet. Usually there is some hardheaded cynic in the
community with native perception enough to enlighten the rest as to the
true value of the phenomenon; but there seems to have been none here. I
ought to have come sooner to see him, and then I could have had a chance
to go again and talk soberly and kindly with him, and show him gently
how much he had mistaken himself. Oh, _get_ up!” By this time the mare
had lapsed again into her habitual absent-mindedness, and was limping
along the dark road with a tendency to come to a full stop, from step to
step. The remorse in the minister's soul was so keen that he could not
use her with the cruelty necessary to rouse her flagging energies; as he
held the reins he flapped his elbows up toward his face, as if they were
wings, and contrived to beat away a few of the mosquitoes with them;
Mrs. Sewell, in silent exasperation, fought them from her with the bough
which she had torn from an overhanging birch-tree.

In the morning they returned to Boston, and Sewell's parish duties began
again; he was rather faithfuller and busier in these than he might have
been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all sorts, and
so little upon beliefs. He declared that he envied the ministers of the
good old times who had only to teach their people that they would be
lost if they did not do right; it was much simpler than to make them
understand that they were often to be good for reasons not immediately
connected with their present or future comfort, and that they could not
confidently expect to be lost for any given transgression, or even to be
lost at all. He found it necessary to do his work largely in a personal
way, by meeting and talking with people, and this took up a great deal
of his time, especially after the summer vacation, when he had to get
into relations with them anew, and to help them recover themselves
from the moral lassitude into which people fall during that season of
physical recuperation.

He was occupied with these matters one morning late in October when
a letter came addressed in a handwriting of copybook carefulness, but
showing in every painstaking stroke the writer's want of training,
which, when he read it, filled Sewell with dismay. It was a letter from
Lemuel Barker, whom Sewell remembered, with a pang of self-upbraiding,
as the poor fellow he had visited with his wife the evening before they
left Willoughby Pastures; and it enclosed passages of a long poem which
Barker said he had written since he got the fall work done. The passages
were not submitted for Sewell's criticism, but were offered as examples
of the character of the whole poem, for which the author wished to find
a publisher. They were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical
sort, but they seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical
facility of versification, that Sewell wondered how the writer should
have mastered the notion of anything so literary as publication, till
he came to that part of the letter in which Barker spoke of their having
had so much sickness in the family that he thought he would try to
do something to help along. The avowal of this meritorious ambition
inflicted another wound upon Sewell's guilty consciousness; but what
made his blood run cold was Barker's proposal to come down to Boston, if
Sewell advised, and find a publisher with Sewell's assistance.

This would never do, and the minister went to his desk with the
intention of despatching a note of prompt and total discouragement.
But in crossing the room from the chair into which he had sunk, with a
cheerful curiosity, to read the letter, he could not help some natural
rebellion against the punishment visited upon him. He could not deny
that he deserved punishment, but he thought that this, to say the least,
was very ill-timed. He had often warned other sinners who came to him
in like resentment that it was this very quality of inopportuneness that
was perhaps the most sanative and divine property of retribution; the
eternal justice fell upon us, he said, at the very moment when we were
least able to bear it, or thought ourselves so; but now in his own case
the clear-sighted prophet cried out and revolted in his heart. It was
Saturday morning, when every minute was precious to him for his sermon,
and it would take him fully an hour to write that letter; it must be
done with the greatest sympathy; he had seen that this poor foolish boy
was very sensitive, and yet it must be done with such thoroughness as to
cut off all hope of anything like literary achievement for him.

At the moment Sewell reached his desk, with a spirit disciplined to the
sacrifice required of it, he heard his wife's step outside his study
door, and he had just time to pull open a drawer, throw the letter into
it, and shut it again before she entered. He did not mean finally to
conceal it from her, but he was willing to give himself breath before he
faced her with the fact that he had received such a letter. Nothing in
its way was more terrible to this good man than the righteousness of
that good woman. In their case, as in that of most other couples who
cherish an ideal of dutiful living, she was the custodian of their
potential virtue, and he was the instrument, often faltering and
imperfect, of its application to circumstances; and without wishing to
spare himself too much, he was sometimes aware that she did not spare
him enough. She worked his moral forces as mercilessly as a woman uses
the physical strength of a man when it is placed at her direction.

“What is the matter, David?” she asked, with a keen glance at the face
he turned upon her over his shoulder.

“Nothing that I wish to talk of at present, my dear,” answered Sewell,
with a boldness that he knew would not avail him if she persisted in
knowing.

“Well, there would be no time if you did,” said his wife. “I'm
dreadfully sorry for you, David, but it's really a case you can't
refuse. Their own minister is taken sick, and it's appointed for this
afternoon at two o'clock, and the poor thing has set her heart upon
having you, and you must go. In fact, I promised you would. I'll see
that you're not disturbed this morning, so that you'll have the whole
forenoon to yourself. But I thought I'd better tell you at once. It's
only a child--a little boy. You won't have to say much.”

“Oh, of course I must go,” answered Sewell, with impatient resignation;
and when his wife left the room, which she did after praising him and
pitying him in a way that was always very sweet to him, he saw that he
must begin his sermon at once, if he meant to get through with it in
time, and must put off all hope of replying to Lemuel Barker till Monday
at least. But he chose quite a different theme from that on which he had
intended to preach. By an immediate inspiration he wrote a sermon on the
text, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel,” in which he taught
how great harm could be done by the habit of saying what are called kind
things. He showed that this habit arose not from goodness of heart,
or from the desire to make others happy, but from the wish to spare
one's-self the troublesome duty of formulating the truth so that it
would perform its heavenly office without wounding those whom it was
intended to heal. He warned his hearers that the kind things spoken
from this motive were so many sins committed against the soul of the
flatterer and the soul of him they were intended to flatter; they were
deceits, lies; and he besought all within the sound of his voice to
try to practise with one another an affectionate sincerity, which was
compatible not only with the brotherliness of Christianity, but
the politeness of the world. He enforced his points with many apt
illustrations, and he treated the whole subject with so much fulness and
fervour, that he fell into the error of the literary temperament, and
almost felt that he had atoned for his wrongdoing by the force with
which he had portrayed it.

Mrs. Sewell, who did not always go to her husband's sermons, was at
church that day, and joined him when some ladies who had lingered to
thank him for the excellent lesson he had given them at last left him to
her.

“Really, David,” she said, “I wondered your congregation could keep
their countenances while you were going on. Did you think of that poor
boy up at Willoughby Pastures when you were writing that sermon?”

“Yes, my dear,” replied Sewell gravely; “he was in my mind the whole
time.”

“Well, you were rather hard upon yourself; and I think I was rather too
hard upon you, that time, though I was so vexed with you. But nothing
has come of it, and I suppose there are cases where people are so lost
to common sense that you can't do anything for them by telling them the
truth.”

“But you'd better tell it, all the same,” said Sewell, still in a glow
of righteous warmth from his atonement; and now a sudden temptation to
play with fire seized him. “You wouldn't have excused me if any trouble
had come of it.”

“No, I certainly shouldn't,” said his wife. “But I don't regret it
altogether if it's made you see what danger you run from that tendency
of yours. What in the world made you think of it?”

“Oh, it came into my mind.” said Sewell.

He did not find time to write to Barker the next day, and on recurring
to his letter he saw that there was no danger of his taking another step
without his advice, and he began to postpone it; when he had time he was
not in the mood; he waited for the time and the mood to come together,
and he also waited for the most favourable moment to tell his wife that
he had got that letter from Barker and to ask her advice about answering
it. If it had been really a serious matter, he would have told her at
once; but being the thing it was, he did not know just how to approach
it, after his first concealment. He knew that, to begin with, he would
have to account for his mistake in attempting to keep it from her, and
would have to bear some just upbraiding for this unmanly course, and
would then be miserably led to the distasteful contemplation of the
folly by which he had brought this trouble upon himself. Sewell smiled
to think how much easier it was to make one's peace with one's God
than with one's wife; and before he had brought himself to the point of
answering Barker's letter, there came a busy season in which he forgot
him altogether.




II.


One day in the midst of this Sewell was called from his study to see
some one who was waiting for him in the reception-room, but who sent in
no name by the housemaid.

“I don't know as you remember me,” the visitor said, rising awkwardly,
as Sewell came forward with a smile of inquiry. “My name's Barker.”

“Barker?” said the minister, with a cold thrill of instant recognition,
but playing with a factitious uncertainty till he could catch his breath
in the presence of the calamity. “Oh yes! How do you do?” he said; and
then planting himself adventurously upon the commandment to love one's
neighbour as one's-self, he added: “I'm very glad to see you!”

In token of his content, he gave Barker his hand and asked him to be
seated.

The young man complied, and while Sewell waited for him to present
himself in some shape that he could grapple with morally, he made an
involuntary study of his personal appearance. That morning, before
starting from home by the milk-train that left Willoughby Pastures at
4.5, Barker had given his Sunday boots a coat of blacking, which he had
eked out with stove-polish, and he had put on his best pantaloons, which
he had outgrown, and which, having been made very tight a season after
tight pantaloons had gone out of fashion in Boston, caught on the tops
of his boots and stuck there in spite of his efforts to kick them loose
as he stood up, and his secret attempts to smooth them down when he had
reseated himself. He wore a single-breasted coat of cheap broadcloth,
fastened across his chest with a carnelian clasp-button of his father's,
such as country youth wore thirty years ago, and a belated summer scarf
of gingham, tied in a breadth of knot long since abandoned by polite
society.

Sewell had never thought his wife's reception-room very splendidly
appointed, but Barker must have been oppressed by it, for he sat in
absolute silence after resuming his chair, and made no sign of intending
to open the matter upon which he came. In the kindness of his heart
Sewell could not refrain from helping him on.

“When did you come to Boston?” he asked with a cheeriness which he was
far from feeling.

“This morning,” said Barker briefly, but without the tremor in his voice
which Sewell expected.

“You've never been here before, I suppose,” suggested Sewell, with the
vague intention of generalising or particularising the conversation, as
the case might be.

Barker abruptly rejected the overture, whatever it was. “I don't know as
you got a letter from me a spell back,” he said.

“Yes, I did,” confessed Sewell. “I did receive that letter,” he
repeated, “and I ought to have answered it long ago. But the fact is--”
 He corrected himself when it came to his saying this, and said, “I
mean that I put it by, intending to answer it when I could do so in the
proper way, until, I'm very sorry to say, I forgot it altogether. Yes,
I forgot it, and I certainly ask your pardon for my neglect. But I can't
say that as it's turned out I altogether regret it. I can talk with you
a great deal better than I could write to you in regard to your”--Sewell
hesitated between the words poems and verses, and finally said--“work.
I have blamed myself a great deal,” he continued, wincing under the hurt
which he felt that he must be inflicting on the young man as well as
himself, “for not being more frank with you when I saw you at home in
September. I hope your mother is well?”

“She's middling,” said Barker, “but my married sister that came to
live with us since you was there has had a good deal of sickness in her
family. Her husband's laid up with the rheumatism most of the time.”

“Oh!” murmured Sewell sympathetically. “Well! I ought to have told you
at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing acceptable
work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you ever expected
to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious purpose,--for
anything but your own pleasure and entertainment,--I should certainly
have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens of the long poem you
have sent me give me even less reason to encourage you than the things
you read me at home.”

Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker's air-castles to break the
silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words; but
nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see, Barker
remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled Sewell a
little to see him apparently so besotted in his own conceit, and he
added: “But I think I had better not ask you to rely altogether upon my
opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to a publisher, and you
can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a moment.”

He left the room and went slowly upstairs to his wife. It appeared
to him a very short journey to the third story, where he knew she was
decking the guest-chamber for the visit of a friend whom they expected
that evening. He imagined himself saying to her when his trial was well
over that he did not see why she complained of those stairs; that he
thought they were nothing at all. But this sense of the absurdity of the
situation which played upon the surface of his distress flickered and
fled at sight of his wife bustling cheerfully about, and he was tempted
to go down and get Barker out of the house, and out of Boston if
possible, without letting her know anything of his presence.

“Well?” said Mrs. Sewell, meeting his face of perplexity with a
penetrating glance. “What is it, David?”

“Nothing. That is--everything! Lemuel Barker is here!”

“Lemuel Barker? Who is Lemuel Barker?” She stood with the pillow-sham
in her hand which she was just about to fasten on the pillow, and Sewell
involuntarily took note of the fashion in which it was ironed.

“Why, surely you remember! That simpleton at Willoughby Pastures.” If
his wife had dropped the pillow-sham, and sunk into a chair beside
the bed, fixing him with eyes of speechless reproach; if she had done
anything dramatic, or said anything tragic, no matter how unjust or
exaggerated, Sewell could have borne it; but she only went on tying the
sham on the pillow, without a word. “The fact is, he wrote to me some
weeks ago, and sent me some specimens of a long poem.”

“Just before you preached that sermon on the tender mercies of the
wicked?”

“Yes,” faltered Sewell. “I had been waiting to show you the letter.”

“You waited a good while, David.”

“I know--I know,” said Sewell miserably. “I was waiting--waiting--” He
stopped, and then added with a burst, “I was waiting till I could put it
to you in some favourable light.”

“I'm glad you're honest about it at last, my dear!”

“Yes. And while I was waiting I forgot Barker's letter altogether. I put
it away somewhere--I can't recollect just where, at the moment. But that
makes no difference; he's here with the whole poem in his pocket, now.”
 Sewell gained a little courage from his wife's forbearance; she knew
that she could trust him in all great matters, and perhaps she thought
that for this little sin she would not add to his punishment. “And
what I propose to do is to make a complete thing of it, this time. Of
course,” he went on convicting himself, “I see that I shall inflict
twice the pain that I should have done if I had spoken frankly to him
at first; and of course there will be the added disappointment, and the
expense of his coming to Boston. But,” he added brightly, “we can save
him any expense while he's here, and perhaps I can contrive to get him
to go home this afternoon.”

“He wouldn't let you pay for his dinner out of the house anywhere,” said
Mrs. Sewell. “You must ask him to dinner here.”

“Well,” said Sewell, with resignation; and suspecting that his wife was
too much piqued or hurt by his former concealment to ask what he now
meant to do about Barker, he added: “I'm going to take him round to a
publisher and let him convince himself that there's no hope for him in a
literary way.”

“David!” cried his wife; and now she left off adjusting the shams, and
erecting herself looked at him across the bed, “You don't intend to do
anything so cruel.”

“Cruel?”

“Yes! Why should you go and waste any publisher's time by getting him
to look at such rubbish? Why should you expose the poor fellow to the
mortification of a perfectly needless refusal? Do you want to shirk the
responsibility--to put it on some one else?”

“No; you know I don't.”

“Well, then, tell him yourself that it won't do.”

“I have told him.”

“What does he say?”

“He doesn't say anything. I can't make out whether he believes me or
not.”

“Very well, then; you've done your duty, at any rate.” Mrs. Sewell
could not forbear saying also, “If you'd done it at first, David, there
wouldn't have been any of this trouble.”

“That's true,” owned her husband, so very humbly that her heart smote
her.

“Well, go down and tell him he must stay to dinner, and then try to
get rid of him the best way you can. Your time is really too precious,
David, to be wasted in this way. You _must_ get rid of him, somehow.”

Sewell went back to his guest in the reception-room, who seemed to have
remained as immovably in his chair as if he had been a sitting statue of
himself. He did not move when Sewell entered.

“On second thoughts,” said the minister, “I believe I will not ask you
to go to a publisher with me, as I had intended; it would expose you to
unnecessary mortification, and it would be, from my point of view, an
unjustifiable intrusion upon very busy people. I must ask you to take
my word for it that no publisher would bring out your poem, and it never
would pay you a cent if he did.” The boy remained silent as before, and
Sewell had no means of knowing whether it was from silent conviction or
from mulish obstinacy. “Mrs. Sewell will be down presently. She wished
me to ask you to stay to dinner. We have an early dinner, and there will
be time enough after that for you to look about the city.”

“I shouldn't like to put you out,” said Barker.

“Oh, not at all,” returned Sewell, grateful for this sign of animation,
and not exigent of a more formal acceptance of his invitation. “You
know,” he said, “that literature is a trade, like every other vocation,
and that you must serve an apprenticeship if you expect to excel. But
first of all you must have some natural aptitude for the business you
undertake. You understand?” asked Sewell; for he had begun to doubt
whether Barker understood anything. He seemed so much more stupid than
he had at home; his faculties were apparently sealed up, and he had lost
all the personal picturesqueness which he had when he came in out of the
barn, at his mother's call, to receive Sewell.

“Yes,” said the boy.

“I don't mean,” continued Sewell, “that I wouldn't have you continue
to make verses whenever you have the leisure for it. I think, on
the contrary, that it will give a grace to your life which it might
otherwise lack. We are all in daily danger of being barbarised by the
sordid details of life; the constantly recurring little duties which
must be done, but which we must not allow to become the whole of life.”
 Sewell was so much pleased with this thought, when it had taken form in
words, that he made a mental note of it for future use. “We must put a
border of pinks around the potato-patch, as Emerson would say, or else
the potato-patch is no better than a field of thistles.” Perhaps because
the logic of this figure rang a little false, Sewell hastened to add:
“But there are many ways in which we can prevent the encroachment of
those little duties without being tempted to neglect them, which would
be still worse. I have thought a good deal about the condition of our
young men in the country, and I have sympathised with them in what seems
their want of opportunity, their lack of room for expansion. I have
often wished that I could do something for them--help them in their
doubts and misgivings, and perhaps find some way out of the trouble for
them. I regret this tendency to the cities of the young men from the
country. I am sure that if we could give them some sort of social
and intellectual life at home, they would not be so restless and
dissatisfied.”

Sewell felt as if he had been preaching to a dead wall; but now the
wall opened, and a voice came out of it, saying: “You mean something to
occupy their minds?”

“Exactly so!” cried Sewell. “Something to occupy their minds. Now,” he
continued, with a hope of getting into some sort of human relations with
his guest which he had not felt before, “why shouldn't a young man on
a farm take up some scientific study, like geology, for instance, which
makes every inch of earth vocal, every rock historic, and the waste
places social?” Barker looked so blankly at him that he asked again,
“You understand?”

“Yes,” said Barker; but having answered Sewell's personal question, he
seemed to feel himself in no wise concerned with the general inquiry
which Sewell had made, and he let it lie where Sewell had let it drop.
But the minister was so well pleased with the fact that Barker had
understood anything of what he had said, that he was content to let the
notion he had thrown out take its chance of future effect, and rising,
said briskly: “Come upstairs with me into my study, and I will show you
a picture of Agassiz. It's a very good photograph.”

He led the way out of the reception-room, and tripped lightly in his
slippered feet up the steps against which Barker knocked the toes of his
clumsy boots. He was not large, nor naturally loutish, but the
heaviness of the country was in every touch and movement. He dropped the
photograph twice in his endeavour to hold it between his stiff thumb and
finger.

Sewell picked it up each time for him, and restored it to his faltering
hold. When he had securely lodged it there, he asked sweetly: “Did you
ever hear what Agassiz said when a scheme was once proposed to him by
which he could make a great deal of money?”

“I don't know as I did,” replied Barker.

“'But, gentlemen, _I've no time to make money_.'” Barker received the
anecdote in absolute silence, standing helplessly with the photograph in
his hand; and Sewell with a hasty sigh forbore to make the application
to the ordinary American ambition to be rich that he had intended.
“That's a photograph of the singer Nilsson,” he said, cataloguing the
other objects on the chimney-piece. “She was a peasant, you know,
a country girl in Norway. That's Grévy, the President of the French
Republic; his father was a peasant. Lincoln, of course. Sforza, throwing
his hoe into the oak,” he said, explaining the picture that had caught
Barker's eye on the wall above the mantel. “He was working in the field,
when a band of adventurers came by, and he tossed his hoe at the tree.
If it fell to the ground, he would keep on hoeing; if it caught in the
branches and hung there, he would follow the adventurers. It caught, and
he went with the soldiers and became Duke of Milan. I like to keep the
pictures of these great Originals about me,” said Sewell, “because in
our time, when we refer so constantly to law, we are apt to forget
that God is creative as well as operative.” He used these phrases
involuntarily; they slipped from his tongue because he was in the habit
of saying this about these pictures, and he made no effort to adapt them
to Barker's comprehension, because he could not see that the idea would
be of any use to him. He went on pointing out the different objects in
the quiet room, and he took down several books from the shelves that
covered the whole wall, and showed them to Barker, who, however, made no
effort to look at them for himself, and did not say anything about them.
He did what Sewell bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if
he had been an Indian he could not have regarded them with a greater
reticence. Sewell made him sit down from time to time, but in a sitting
posture Barker's silence became so deathlike that Sewell hastened to get
him on his legs again, and to walk him about from one point to another,
as if to keep life in him. At the end of one of these otherwise aimless
excursions Mrs. Sewell appeared, and infused a gleam of hope into her
husband's breast. Apparently she brought none to Barker; or perhaps he
did not conceive it polite to show any sort of liveliness before a lady.
He did what he could with the hand she gave him to shake, and answered
the brief questions she put to him about his family to precisely the
same effect as he had already reported its condition to Sewell.

“Dinner's ready now,” said Mrs. Sewell, for all comment. She left
the expansiveness of sympathy and gratulation to her husband on most
occasions, and on this she felt that she had less than the usual
obligation to make polite conversation. Her two children came downstairs
after her, and as she unfolded her napkin across her lap after grace she
said, “This is my son, Alfred, Mr. Barker; and this is Edith.” Barker
took the acquaintance offered in silence, the young Sewells smiled
with the wise kindliness of children taught to be good to all manner
of strange guests, and the girl cumbered the helpless country boy with
offers of different dishes.

Mr. Sewell as he cut at the roast beef lengthwise, being denied by his
wife a pantomimic prayer to be allowed to cut it crosswise, tried to
make talk with Barker about the weather at Willoughby Pastures. It had
been a very dry summer, and he asked if the fall rains had filled up the
springs. He said he really forgot whether it was an apple year. He also
said that he supposed they had dug all their turnips by this time. He
had meant to say potatoes when he began, but he remembered that he had
seen the farmers digging their potatoes before he came back to town, and
so he substituted turnips; afterwards it seemed to him that dig was not
just the word to use in regard to the harvesting of turnips. He
wished he had said, “got your turnips in,” but it appeared to make no
difference to Barker, who answered, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Yes,
sir,” and let each subject drop with that.




III.


The silence grew so deep that the young Sewells talked together in
murmurs, and the clicking of the knives on the plates became painful.
Sewell kept himself from looking at Barker, whom he nevertheless knew
to be changing his knife and fork from one hand to the other, as doubt
after doubt took him as to their conventional use, and to be getting
very little good of his dinner in the process of settling these
questions. The door-bell rang, and the sound of a whispered conference
between the visitor and the servant at the threshold penetrated to the
dining-room. Some one softly entered, and then Mrs. Sewell called out,
“Yes, yes! Come in! Come in, Miss Vane!” She jumped from her chair and
ran out into the hall, where she was heard to kiss her visitor; she
reappeared, still holding her by the hand, and then Miss Vane shook
hands with Sewell, saying in a tone of cordial liking, “_How_ d'ye do?”
 and to each of the young people as she shook hands in turn with them,
“How d'ye _do_, dear?” She was no longer so pretty as she must have once
been; but an air of distinction and a delicate charm of manner remained
to her from her fascinating youth.

Young Sewell pushed her a chair to the table, and she dropped softly
into it, after acknowledging Barker's presentation by Mrs. Sewell with a
kindly glance that probably divined him.

“You must dine with us,” said Mrs. Sewell. “You can call it lunch.”

“No, I can't, Mrs. Sewell,” said Miss Vane. “I could once, and should
have said with great pleasure, when I went away, that I had been
lunching at the Sewells; but I can't now. I've reformed. What have you
got for dinner?”

“Roast beef,” said Sewell.

“Nothing I dislike more,” replied Miss Vane. “What else?” She put on her
glasses, and peered critically about the table.

“Stewed tomatoes, baked sweet potatoes, macaroni.”

“How unimaginative! What are you going to have afterwards?”

“Cottage pudding.”

“The very climax of the commonplace. Well!” Miss Vane began to pull off
her gloves, and threw her veil back over her shoulder. “I will dine with
you, but when I say dine, and people ask me to explain, I shall have to
say, 'Why, the Sewells still dine at one o'clock, you know,' and
laugh over your old-fashioned habits with them. I should like to do
differently, and to respect the sacredness of broken bread and that
sort of thing; but I'm trying to practise with every one an affectionate
sincerity, which is perfectly compatible not only with the brotherliness
of Christianity, but the politeness of the world.” Miss Vane looked
demurely at Mrs. Sewell. “I can't make any exceptions.”

The ladies both broke into a mocking laugh, in which Sewell joined with
sheepish reluctance; after all, one does not like to be derided, even by
one's dearest friends.

“As soon as I hear my other little sins denounced from the pulpit, I'm
going to stop using profane language and carrying away people's spoons
in my pocket.”

The ladies seemed to think this also a very good joke, and his children
laughed in sympathy, but Sewell hung his head; Barker sat bolt upright
behind his plate, and stared at Miss Vane. “I never have been all but
named in church before,” she concluded, “and I've heard others say the
same.”

“Why didn't you come to complain sooner?” asked Sewell.

“Well, I have been away ever since that occasion. I went down the
next day to Newport, and I've been there ever since, admiring the
ribbon-planting.”

“On the lawns or on the ladies?” asked Sewell.

“Both. And sowing broadcast the seeds of plain speaking. I don't know
what Newport will be in another year if they all take root.”

“I dare say it will be different,” said Sewell. “I'm not sure it will
be worse.” He plucked up a little spirit, and added: “Now you see of how
little importance you really are in the community; you have been gone
these three weeks, and your own pastor didn't know you were out of
town.”

“Yes, you did, David,” interposed his wife. “I told you Miss Vane was
away two weeks ago.”

“Did you? Well I forgot it immediately; the fact was of no consequence,
one way or the other. How do you like that as a bit of affectionate
sincerity?”

“I like it immensely,” said Miss Vane. “It's delicious. I only wish I
could believe you were honest.” She leaned back and laughed into
her handkerchief, while Sewell regarded her with a face in which his
mortification at being laughed at was giving way to a natural pleasure
at seeing Miss Vane enjoy herself. “What do you think,” she asked,
“since you're in this mood of exasperated veracity--or pretend to be--of
the flower charity?”

“Do you mean by the barrel, or the single sack? The Graham, or the best
Haxall, or the health-food cold-blast?” asked Sewell.

Miss Vane lost her power of answering in another peal of laughter,
sobering off, and breaking down again before she could say, “I mean cut
flowers for patients and prisoners.”

“Oh, that kind! I don't think a single pansy would have an appreciable
effect upon a burglar; perhaps a bunch of forget-me-nots might, or a
few lilies of the valley carelessly arranged. As to the influence of a
graceful little _boutonnière_, in cases of rheumatism or cholera morbus,
it might be efficacious but I can't really say.”

“How perfectly cynical!” cried Miss Vane. “Don't you know how much good
the flower mission has accomplished among the deserving poor? Hundreds
of bouquets are distributed every day. They prevent crime.”

“That shows how susceptible the deserving poor are. I don't find that
a bowl of the most expensive and delicate roses in the centre of a
dinner-table tempers the asperity of the conversation when it turns upon
the absent. But perhaps it oughtn't to do so.”

“I don't know about that,” said Miss Vane; “but if you had an impulsive
niece to supply with food for the imagination, you would be very glad of
anything that seemed to combine practical piety and picturesque effect.”

“Oh, if you mean that,” began Sewell more soberly, and his wife leaned
forward with an interest in the question which she had not felt while
the mere joking went on.

“Yes. When Sibyl came in this morning with an imperative demand to be
allowed to go off and do good with flowers in the homes of virtuous
poverty, as well as the hospitals and prisons, I certainly felt as if
there had been an interposition, if you will allow me to say so.”

Miss Vane still had her joking air, but a note of anxiety had crept into
her voice.

“I don't think it will do the sick and poor any harm,” said Sewell, “and
it may do Sibyl some good.” He smiled a little in adding: “It may afford
her varied energies a little scope.”

Miss Vane shook her head, and some lines of age came into her face which
had not shown themselves there before. “And you would advise letting her
go into it?” she asked.

“By all means,” replied Sewell. “But if she's going to engage actively
in the missionary work, I think you'd better go with her on her errands
of mercy.”

“Oh, of course, she's going to do good in person. What she wants is
the sensation of doing good--of seeing and hearing the results of her
beneficence. She'd care very little about it if she didn't.”

“Oh, I don't know that you can say that,” replied Sewell in deprecation
of this extreme view. “I don't believe,” he continued, “that she would
object to doing good for its own sake.”

“Of course she wouldn't, David! Who in the world supposed she would?”
 demanded his wife, bringing him up roundly at this sign of wandering,
and Miss Vane laughed wildly.

“And is this what your doctrine of sincerity comes to? This fulsomeness!
You're very little better than one of the wicked, it seems to me! Well,
I _hoped_ that you would approve of my letting Sibyl take this thing up,
but such _unbounded_ encouragement!”

“Oh, I don't wish to flatter,” said Sewell, in the spirit of her
raillery. “It will be very well for her to go round with flowers; but
don't let her,” he continued seriously--“don't let her imagine it's more
than an innocent amusement. It would be a sort of hideous mockery of the
good we ought to do one another if there were supposed to be anything
more than a kindly thoughtfulness expressed in such a thing.”

“Oh, if Sibyl doesn't feel that it's real, for the time being she won't
care anything about it. She likes to lose herself in the illusion, she
says.”

“Well!” said Sewell with a slight shrug, “then we must let her get what
good she can out of it as an exercise of the sensibilities.”

“O my dear!” exclaimed his wife, “You _don't_ mean anything so
abominable as that! I've heard you say that the worst thing about
fiction and the theatre was that they brought emotions into play that
ought to be sacred to real occasions.”

“Did I say that? Well, I must have been right. I--”

Barker made a scuffling sound with his boots under the table, and rose
to his feet. “I guess,” he said, “I shall have to be going.”

They had all forgotten him, and Sewell felt as if he had neglected this
helpless guest. “Why, no, you mustn't go! I was in hopes we might do
something to make the day pleasant to you. I intended proposing--”

“Yes,” his wife interrupted, believing that he meant to give up one
of his precious afternoons to Barker, and hastening to prevent the
sacrifice, “my son will show you the Public Garden and the Common, and
go about the town with you.” She rose too, and young Sewell, accustomed
to suffer, silently acquiesced. “If your train isn't to start very
soon--”

“I guess I better be going,” said Barker, and Mrs. Sewell now gave her
husband a look conveying her belief that Barker would be happier if they
let him go. At the same time she frowned upon the monstrous thought of
asking him to stay the night with them, which she detected in Sewell's
face.

She allowed him to say nothing but, “I'm sorry; but if you really
must--”

“I guess I better,” persisted Barker. He got himself somehow to the
door, where he paused a moment, and contrived to pant, “Well, good day,”
 and without effort at more cordial leave-taking, passed out.

Sewell followed him, and helped him find his hat, and made him shake
hands. He went with him to the door, and, beginning to suffer afresh at
the wrong he had done Barker, he detained him at the threshold. “If you
still wish to see a publisher, Mr. Barker, I will gladly go with you.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. I guess I don't want to see any publisher
this afternoon. Well, good afternoon!” He turned away from Sewell's
remorseful pursuit, and clumsily hurrying down the steps, he walked
up the street and round the next corner. Sewell stood watching him in
rueful perplexity, shading his eyes from the mild October sun with his
hand; and some moments after Barker had disappeared, he remained looking
after him.

When he rejoined the ladies in the dining-room they fell into a
conscious silence.

“Have you been telling, Lucy?” he asked.

“Yes, I've been telling, David. It was the only way. Did you offer to go
with him to a publisher again?”

“Yes, I did. It was the only way,” said Sewell.

Miss Vane and his wife both broke into a cry of laughter. The former got
her breath first. “So _that_ was the origin of the famous sermon that
turned all our heads grey with good resolutions.” Sewell assented with a
sickly grin. “What in the world _made_ you encourage him?”

“My goodness of heart, which I didn't take the precaution of mixing with
goodness of head before I used it.”

Everything was food for Miss Vane's laugh, even this confession. “But
what is the natural history of the boy? How came he to write poetry?
What do you suppose he means by it?”

“That isn't so easy to say. As to his natural history, he lives with his
mother in a tumbledown, unpainted wooden house in the deepest fastness
of Willoughby Pastures. Lucy and I used to drive by it and wonder what
kind of people inhabited that solitude. There were milk-cans scattered
round the door-yard, and the Monday we were there a poverty-stricken
wash flapped across it. The thought of the place preyed upon me till one
day I asked about it at the post-office, and the postmistress told me
that the boy was quite a literary character, and read everything he
could lay his hands on, and 'sat up nights' writing poetry. It seemed to
me a very clear case of genius, and the postmistress's facts rankled in
my mind till I couldn't stand it any longer. Then I went to see him. I
suppose Lucy has told you the rest?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sewell has told me the rest. But still I don't see how he
came to write poetry. I believe it doesn't pay, even in extreme cases of
genius.”

“Ah, but that's just what this poor fellow didn't know. He must have
read somewhere, in some deleterious newspaper, about the sale of some
large edition of a poem, and have had his own wild hopes about it. I
don't say his work didn't show sense; it even showed some rude strength,
of a didactic, satirical sort, but it certainly didn't show poetry. He
might have taken up painting by a little different chance. And when it
was once known about the neighbourhood that he wrote poetry, his vanity
was flattered--”

“Yes, I see. But wasn't there any kind soul to tell him that he was
throwing his time away?”

“It appears not.”

“And even the kind soul from Boston, who visited him,” suggested Mrs.
Sewell. “Go on, David.”

“Visited him in spite of his wife's omniscience,--even the kind soul
from Boston paltered with this plain duty. Even he, to spare himself
the pain of hurting the boy's feelings, tried to find some of the lines
better than others, and left him with the impression that he had praised
them.”

“Well, that was pretty bad,” said Miss Vane. “You had to tell him
to-day, I suppose, that there was no hope for him?”

“Yes, I had to tell him at last, after letting him waste his time and
money in writing more stuff and coming to Boston with it. I've put him
to needless shame, and I've inflicted suffering upon him that I can't
lighten in the least by sharing.”

“No, that's the most discouraging thing about pitying people. It does
them no manner of good,” said Miss Vane, “and just hurts you. Don't
you think that in an advanced civilisation we shall cease to feel
compassion? Why don't you preach against common pity, as you did against
common politeness?”

“Well, it isn't quite such a crying sin yet. But really, really,”
 exclaimed Sewell, “the world seems so put together that I believe we
ought to think twice before doing a good action.”

“David!” said his wife warningly.

“Oh, let him go on!” cried Miss Vane, with a laugh. “I'm proof against
his monstrous doctrines. Go on, Mr. Sewell.”

“What I mean is this.” Sewell pushed himself back in his chair, and then
stopped.

“Is what?” prompted both the ladies.

“Why, suppose the boy really had some literary faculty, should I have
had any right to encourage it? He was very well where he was. He fed the
cows and milked them, and carried the milk to the crossroads, where the
dealer collected it and took it to the train. That was his life, with
the incidental facts of cutting the hay and fodder, and bedding the
cattle; and his experience never went beyond it. I doubt if his fancy
ever did, except in some wild, mistaken excursion. Why shouldn't he have
been left to this condition? He ate, he slept, he fulfilled his use.
Which of us does more?”

“How would you like to have been in his place?” asked his wife.

“I couldn't _put_ myself in his place; and therefore I oughtn't to have
done anything to take him out of it,” answered Sewell.

“It seems to me that's very un-American,” said Miss Vane. “I thought
we had prospered up to the present point by taking people out of their
places.”

“Yes, we have,” replied the minister, “and sometimes, it seems to me,
the result is hideous. I don't mind people taking themselves out of
their places; but if the particles of this mighty cosmos have been
adjusted by the divine wisdom, what are we to say of the temerity that
disturbs the least of them?”

“I'm sure I don't know,” said Miss Vane, rising. “I'm almost afraid to
stir, in view of the possible consequences. But I can't sit here all
day, and if Mrs. Sewell will excuse me, I'll go at once. Yes, 'I guess
I better be going,' as your particle Barker says. Let us hope he'll get
safely back to his infinitesimal little crevice in the cosmos. He's a
very pretty particle, don't you think? That thick, coarse, wavy black
hair growing in a natural bang over his forehead would make his fortune
if he were a certain kind of young lady.”

They followed her to the door, chatting, and Sewell looked quickly out
when he opened it for her.

As she shook his hand she broke into another laugh. “Really, you looked
as if you were afraid of finding him on the steps!”

“If I could only have got near the poor boy,” said Sewell to his wife,
as they returned withindoors. “If I could only have reached him where
he lives, as our slang says! But do what I would, I couldn't find any
common ground where we could stand together. We were as unlike as if we
were of two different species. I saw that everything I said bewildered
him more and more; he couldn't understand me! Our education is
unchristian, our civilisation is pagan. They both ought to bring us in
closer relations with our fellow-creatures, and they both only put us
more widely apart! Every one of us dwells in an impenetrable solitude!
We understand each other a little if our circumstances are similar, but
if they are different all our words leave us dumb and unintelligible.”




IV.


Barker walked away from the minister's door without knowing where he
was going, and with a heart full of hot pain. He burned with a confused
sense of shame and disappointment and anger. It had turned out just as
his mother had said: Mr. Sewell would be mighty different in Boston from
what he was that day at Willoughby Pastures. There he made Barker think
everything of his poetry, and now he pretended to tell him that it was
not worth anything; and he kept hinting round that Barker had better go
back home and stay there. Did he think he would have left home if there
had been anything for him to do there? Had not he as much as told him
that he was obliged to find something to make a living by, and help the
rest? What was he afraid of? Was he afraid that Barker wanted to come
and live off _him_? He could show him that there was no great danger. If
he had known how, he would have refused even to stay to dinner.

What made him keep the pictures of these people who had got along, if he
thought no one else ought to try? Barker guessed to himself that if that
Mr. Agassiz had had to get a living off the farm at Willoughby Pastures,
he would have _found_ time to make money. What did Mr. Sewell mean by
speaking of that Nilsson lady by her surname, without any Miss or Mrs.?
Was that the way people talked in Boston?

Mr. Sewell had talked to him as if he were a baby, and did not know
anything; and Barker was mad at himself for having stayed half a minute
after the minister had owned up that he had got the letter he wrote
him. He wished he had said, “Well, that's all I want of _you_, sir,” and
walked right out; but he had not known how to do it. Did they think it
was very polite to go on talking with that woman who laughed so much,
and forget all about him? Pretty poor sort of manners to eat with her
bonnet on, and tell them she hated their victuals.

Barker tried to rage against them in these thoughts, but at the bottom
of all was a simple grief that he should have lost the friend whom he
thought he had in the minister; the friend he had talked of and dreamed
of ever since he had seen and heard him speak those cordial words; the
friend he had trusted through all, and had come down to Boston counting
upon so much. The tears came into his eyes as he stumbled and scuffled
along the brick pavements with his uncouth country walk.

He was walking up a straight, long street, with houses just alike on
both sides and bits of grass before them, that sometimes were gay with
late autumn flowers. A horse-car track ran up the middle, and the cars
seemed to be tinkling by all the time, and people getting on and off.
They were mostly ladies and children, and they were very well dressed.
Sometimes they stared at Barker, as they crossed his way in entering or
issuing from the houses, but generally no one appeared to notice him.
In some of the windows there were flowers in painted pots, and in others
little marble images on stands.

There were more images in the garden that Barker came to presently: an
image of Washington on horseback, and some orator speaking, with his
hand up, and on top of a monument a kind of Turk holding up a man that
looked sick. The man was almost naked, but he was not so bad as the
image of a woman in a granite basin; it seemed to Barker that it ought
not to be allowed there. A great many people of all kinds were passing
through the garden, and after some hesitation he went in too, and walked
over the bridge that crossed the pond in the middle of the garden, where
there were rowboats and boats with images of swans on them. Barker
made a sarcastic reflection that Boston seemed to be a great place for
images, and passed rather hurriedly through the garden on the other side
of the bridge. There were beds of all kinds of flowers scattered about,
and they were hardly touched by the cold yet. If he had been in better
heart, he would have liked to look round a little; but he felt strange,
being there all alone, and he felt very low-spirited.

He wondered if this were the Public Garden that Mrs. Sewell had spoken
of, and if that kind of grove across the street were the Common. He
felt much more at home in it, as he wandered up and down the walks, and
finally sat down on one of the iron benches beside the path. At first
he obscurely doubted whether he had any right to do so, unless he had a
lady with him; most of the seats were occupied by couples who seemed to
be courting, but he ventured finally to take one; nobody disturbed him,
and so he remained.

It was a beautiful October afternoon; the wind, warm and dry, caught the
yellow leaves from the trees overhead in little whiffs, and blew them
about the grass, which the fall rains had made as green as May; and a
pensive golden light streamed through the long loose boughs, and struck
across the slopes of the Common. Slight buggies flashed by on the street
near which he sat, and glistening carriages, with drivers dressed out in
uniform like soldiers, rumbled down its slope.

While he sat looking, now at the street and now at the people sauntering
and hurrying to and fro in the Common, he tried to decide a question
that had mixed itself up with the formless resentment he had felt ever
since Mr. Sewell played him false. It had got out in the neighbourhood
that he was going to Boston before he left home; his mother must have
told it; and people would think he was to be gone a long time. He had
warned his mother that he did not know when he should be back, before he
started in the morning; and he knew that she would repeat his words to
everybody who stopped to ask about him during the day, with what she had
said to him in reply: “You better come home to-night, Lem; and I'll have
ye a good hot supper waitin' for ye.”

The question was whether he should go back on the five o'clock train,
which would reach Willoughby Centre after dark, and house himself from
public ignominy for one night at least, or whether self-respect did not
demand that he should stay in Boston for twenty-four hours at any rate,
and see if something would not happen. He had now no distinct hope
of anything; but his pride and shame were holding him fast, while
the home-sickness tugged at his heart, and made him almost forget the
poverty that had spurred him to the adventure of coming to Boston. He
could see the cows coming home through the swampy meadow as plain as if
they were coming across the Common; his mother was calling them; she and
his sister were going to milk in his absence, and he could see her now,
how she looked going out to call the cows, in her bare, grey head,
gaunt of neck and cheek, in the ugly Bloomer dress in which she was
not grotesque to his eyes, though it usually affected strangers with
stupefaction or alarm. But it all seemed far away, as far as if it were
in another planet that he had dropped out of; he was divided from it by
his failure and disgrace. He thought he must stay and try for something,
he did not know what; but he could not make up his mind to throw away
his money for nothing; at the hotel, down by the depot, where he had
left his bag, they were going to make him pay fifty cents for just a
room alone.

“Any them beats 'round here been trying to come their games on _you_?”

At first Barker could not believe himself accosted, though the young man
who spoke stood directly in front of him, and seemed to be speaking to
him. He looked up, and the young man added, “Heigh?”

“Beats? I don't know what you mean,” said Barker.

“Confidence sharps, young feller. They're 'round everywheres, and don't
you forget it. Move up a little!”

Barker was sitting in the middle of the bench, and at this he pushed
away from the young man, who had dropped himself sociably beside him. He
wore a pair of black pantaloons, very tight in the legs, and widening at
the foot so as almost to cover his boots. His coat was deeply braided,
and his waistcoat was cut low, so that his plastron-scarf hung out from
the shirt-bosom, which it would have done well to cover.

“I tell you, Boston's full of 'em,” he said excitedly. “One of 'em come
up to me just now, and says he, 'Seems to me I've seen you before, but
I can't place you.' 'Oh yes,' says I, 'I'll tell you where it was. I
happened to be in the police court one morning when they was sendin'
you up for three months.' I tell you he got round the corner! Might 'a'
played checkers on his coat tail. Why, what do you suppose would
been the next thing if I hadn't have let him know I saw through him?”
 demanded the young man of Barker, who listened to this adventure
with imperfect intelligence. “He'd 'a' said, 'Hain't I seen you down
Kennebunk way som'eres?' And when I said, 'No, I'm from Leominster!'
or where-ever I was from if I was green, he'd say, 'Oh yes, so it _was_
Leominster. How's the folks?' and he'd try to get me to think that _he_
was from Leominster too; and then he'd want me to go off and see the
sights with him; and pretty soon he'd meet a feller that 'ud dun him for
that money he owed him; and he'd say he hadn't got anything with him but
a cheque for forty dollars; and the other feller'd say he'd got to have
his money, and he'd kind of insinuate it was all a put-up job about the
cheque for forty dollars, anyway; and that 'ud make the first feller
mad, and he'd take out the check, and ask him what he thought o' that;
and the other feller'd say, well, it was a good cheque, but it wan't
money, and he wanted money; and then the first feller'd say, 'Well, come
along to the bank and get your money,' and the other'd say the bank was
shut. 'Well, then,' the first feller'd say, 'well, sir, I ain't a-goin'
to ask any favour of _you_. How much _is_ your bill?' and the other
feller'd say ten dollars, or fifteen, or may be twenty-five, if they
thought I had that much, and the first feller'd say, 'Well, here's a
gentleman from up my way, and I guess he'll advance me that much on my
cheque if I make it worth his while. He knows me.' And the first thing
you know--he's been treatin' you, and so polite, showin' you round, and
ast you to go to the theayter--you advance the money, and you keep on
with the first feller, and pretty soon he asks you to hold up a minute,
he wants to go back and get a cigar; and he goes round the corner, and
you hold up, and _hold_ up, and in about a half an hour, or may be less
time, you begin to smell a rat, and you go for a policeman, and the next
morning you find your name in the papers, 'One more unfortunate!' You
look out for 'em, young feller! Wish I _had_ let that one go on till
he done something so I could handed him over to the cops. It's a shame
they're allowed to go 'round, when the cops knows 'em. Hello! There
_comes_ my mate, _now_.” The young man spoke as if they had been talking
of his mate and expecting him, and another young man, his counterpart
in dress, but of a sullen and heavy demeanour very unlike his own brisk
excitement, approached, flapping a bank-note in his hand. “I just been
tellin' this young feller about that beat, you know.”

“Oh, he's all right,” said the mate. “Just seen him down on Tremont
Street, between two cops. Must ha' caught him in the act.”

“You don't say so! Well, that's good, anyway. Why! didn't you' get
it changed?” demanded the young man with painful surprise as his mate
handed him the bank-note.

“No, I didn't. I been to more'n twenty places, and there ain't no small
bills nowhere. The last place, I offered 'em twenty-five cents if they'd
change it.”

“Why didn't you offer 'em fifty? I'd 'a' give fifty, and glad to do it.
Why, I've _got_ to have this bill changed.”

“Well, I'm sorry for you,” said the mate, with ironical sympathy,
“because I don't see how you're goin' to git it done. Won't you move up
a little bit, young feller?” He sat down on the other side of Barker.
“I'm about tired out.” He took his head between his hands in sign of
extreme fatigue, and drooped forward, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

Lemuel's heart beat. Fifty cents would pay for his lodging, and he could
stay till the next day and prolong the chance of something turning up
without too sinful a waste of money.

“How much is the bill?” he asked.

“Ten dollars,” said the young man despondently.

“And will you give me fifty cents if I change it?”

“Well, I said I'd give fifty cents,” replied the young man gloomily,
“and I will.”

“It's a bargain,” said Lemuel promptly, and he took from his pocket the
two five-dollar notes that formed his store, and gave them, to the young
man.

He looked at them critically. “How do I know they're good?” he asked.
“You're a stranger to me, young feller, and how do I know you ain't
tryin' to beat me?” He looked sternly at Lemuel, but here the mate
interposed.

“How does _he_ know that you ain't tryin' to beat _him_?” he asked
contemptuously. “I never saw such a feller as you are! Here you make me
run half over town to change that bill, and now when a gentleman offers
to break it for you, you have to go and accuse him of tryin' to put off
counterfeit money on you. If I was him I'd see you furder.”

“Oh, well, I don't want any words about it. Here, take your money,” said
the young man. “As long as I said I'd do it, I'll do it. Here's your
half a dollar.” He put it, with the bank-note, into Lemuel's hand, and
rose briskly. “You stay here, Jimmy, till I come back. I won't be gone a
minute.”

He walked down the mall, and went out of the gate on Tremont Street.
Then the mate came to himself. “Why, I've _let_ him go off with both
them bills now, and he owes me one of 'em.” With that he rose from
Lemuel's side and hurried after his vanishing comrade; before he was out
of sight he had broken into a run.

Lemuel sat looking after them, his satisfaction in the affair alloyed by
dislike of the haste with which it had been transacted. His rustic mind
worked slowly; it was not wholly content even with a result in its own
favour, where the process had been so rapid; he was scarcely able to
fix the point at which the talk ceased to be a warning against beats and
became his opportunity for speculation. He did not feel quite right at
having taken the fellow's half-dollar; and yet a bargain was a bargain.
Nevertheless, if the fellow wanted to rue it, Lemuel would give him
fifteen minutes to come back and get his money; and he sat for that
space of time where the others had left him. He was not going to be
mean; and he might have waited a little longer if it had not been for
the behaviour of two girls who came up and sat down on the same bench
with him. They could not have been above fifteen or sixteen years
old, and Lemuel thought they were very pretty, but they talked so, and
laughed so loud, and scuffled with each other for the paper of chocolate
which one of them took out of her pocket, that Lemuel, after first being
abashed by the fact that they were city girls, became disgusted with
them. He was a stickler for propriety of behaviour among girls; his
mother had taught him to despise anything like carrying-on among them,
and at twenty he was as severely virginal in his morality as if he had
been twelve.

People looked back at these tomboys when they had got by; and some
shabby young fellows exchanged saucy speeches with them. When Lemuel got
up and walked away in reproving dignity, one of the hoydens bounced into
his place, and they both sent a cry of derision after him. But Lemuel
would not give them the satisfaction of letting them know that he heard
them, and at the same time he was not going to let them suppose that
they had driven him away. He went very slowly down to the street where a
great many horse-cars were passing to and fro, and waited for one marked
“Fitchburg, Lowell, and Eastern Depots.” He was not going to take
it; but he meant to follow it on its way to those stations, in
the neighbourhood of which was the hotel where he had left his
travelling-bag. He had told them that he might take a room there, or he
might not; now since he had this half-dollar extra he thought that he
would stay for the night; it probably would not be any cheaper at the
other hotels.

He ran against a good many people in trying to keep the car in sight,
but by leaving the sidewalk from time to time where it was most crowded,
he managed not to fall very much behind; the worst was that the track
went crooking and turning about so much in different streets, that he
began to lose faith in its direction, and to be afraid, in spite of the
sign on its side, that the car was not going to the depots after all.
But it came in sight of them at last, and then Lemuel, blown with the
chase but secure of his ground, stopped and rested himself against the
side of a wall to get his breath. The pursuit had been very exhausting,
and at times it had been mortifying; for here and there people who saw
him running after the car had supposed he wished to board it, and in
their good-nature had hailed and stopped it. After this had happened
twice or thrice, Lemuel perceived that he was an object of contempt to
the passengers in the car; but he did not know what to do about it; he
was not going to pay six cents to ride when he could just as well walk,
and on the other hand he dared not lose sight of the car, for he had no
other means of finding his way back to his hotel.

But he was all right now, as he leaned against the house-wall, panting,
and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief; he saw his hotel a
little way down the street, and he did not feel anxious about it.

“Gave you the slip after all,” said a passer, who had apparently been
interested in Lemuel's adventure.

“Oh, I didn't want to catch it,” said Lemuel.

“Ah, merely fond of exercise,” said the stranger. “Well, it's a very
good thing, if you don't overdo it.” He walked by, and then after a
glance at Lemuel over his shoulder, he returned to him. “May I ask why
you wanted to chase the car, if you didn't want to catch it?”

Lemuel hesitated; he did not like to confide in a total stranger; this
gentleman looked kind and friendly, but he was all the more likely on
that account to be a beat; the expression was probably such as a beat
would put on in approaching his intended prey. “Oh, nothing,” said
Lemuel evasively.

“I beg your pardon,” said the stranger, and he walked away with what
Lemuel could only conjecture was the air of a baffled beat.

He waited till he was safely out of sight, and then followed on down the
street towards his hotel. When he reached it he walked boldly up to
the clerk's desk, and said that he guessed he would take a room for
the night, and gave him the check for his bag that he had received in
leaving it there.

The clerk wrote the number of a room against Lemuel's name in the
register, and then glanced at the bag. It was a large bag of oilcloth, a
kind of bag which is by nature lank and hollow, and must be made almost
insupportably heavy before it shows any signs of repletion. The shirt
and pair of everyday pantaloons which Lemuel had dropped that morning
into its voracious maw made no apparent effect there, as the clerk held
it up and twirled it on the crook of his thumb.

“I guess I shall have to get the money for that room in advance,” he
said, regarding the bag very critically. However he might have been
wounded by the doubt of his honesty or his solvency implied in this
speech, Lemuel said nothing, but took out his ten-dollar note and handed
it to the clerk. The latter said apologetically, “It's one of our rules,
where there isn't baggage,” and then glancing at the note he flung it
quickly across the counter to Lemuel. “That won't do!”

“Won't do?” repeated Lemuel, taking up the bill.

“Counterfeit,” said the clerk.




V.


Lemuel stretched the note between his hands, and pored so long upon
it that the clerk began to tap impatiently with his finger-tips on the
register. “It won't go?” faltered the boy, looking up at the clerk's
sharp face.

“It won't go here,” replied the clerk. “Got anything else?”

Lemuel's head whirled; the air seemed to darken around him, as he pored
again upon the note, and turned it over and over. Two tears scalded
their way down his cheeks, and his lips twitched, when the clerk added,
“Some beats been workin' you?” but he made no answer. His heart was
hot with shame and rage, and heavy with despair. He put the note in his
pocket, and took his bag and walked out of the hotel. He had not money
enough to get home with now, and besides he could not bear to go back in
the disgrace of such calamity. It would be all over the neighbourhood,
as soon as his mother could tell it; she might wish to keep it to
herself for his sake, but she could not help telling it to the first
person and every person she saw; she would have to go over to the
neighbours to tell it. In a dreary, homesick longing he saw her crossing
the familiar meadows that lay between the houses, bareheaded, in her
apron, her face set and rigid with wonder at what had happened to her
Lem. He could not bear the thought. He would rather die; he would
rather go to sea. This idea flashed into his mind as he lifted his eyes
aimlessly and caught sight of the tall masts of the coal-ships lying at
the railroad wharves, and he walked quickly in the direction of them,
so as not to give himself time to think about it, so as to do it
now, quick, right off. But he found his way impeded by all sorts of
obstacles; a gate closed across the street to let some trains draw in
and out of a station; then a lot of string teams and slow, heavy-laden
trucks got before him, with a turmoil of express wagons, herdics, and
hacks, in which he was near being run over, and was yelled at, sworn at,
and laughed at as he stood bewildered, with his lank bag in his hand. He
turned and walked back past the hotel again. He felt it an escape, after
all, not to have gone to sea; and now a hopeful thought struck him. He
would go back to the Common and watch for those fellows who fooled him,
and set the police on them, and get his money from them; they might
come prowling round again to fool somebody else. He looked out for a car
marked like the one he had followed down from the Common, and began to
follow it on its return. He got ahead of the car whenever it stopped, so
as to be spared the shame of being seen to chase it; and he managed
to keep it in sight till he reached the Common. There he walked about
looking for those scamps, and getting pushed and hustled by the people
who now thronged the paths. At last he was tired out, and on the Beacon
Street mall, where he had first seen those fellows, he found the very
seat where they had all sat together, and sank into it. The seats were
mostly vacant now; a few persons sat there reading their evening papers.
As the light began to wane, they folded up their papers and walked away,
and their places were filled by young men, who at once put their arms
round the young women with them, and seemed to be courting. They did not
say much, if anything; they just sat there. It made Lemuel ashamed to
look at them; he thought they ought to have more sense. He looked away,
but he could not look away from them all, there were so many of them. He
was all the time very hungry, but he thought he ought not to break into
his half-dollar as long as he could help it, or till there was no chance
left of catching those fellows. The night came on, the gas-lamps were
lighted, and some lights higher up, like moonlight off on the other
paths, projected long glares into the night and made the gas look sickly
and yellow. Sitting still there while it grew later, he did not feel
quite so hungry, but he felt more tired than ever. There were not so
many people around now, and he did not see why he should not lie down on
that seat and rest himself a little. He made feints of reclining on his
arm at first, to see if he were noticed; then he stretched himself out,
with his bag under his head, and his hands in his pockets clutching the
money which he meant to make those fellows take back. He got a gas-lamp
in range, to keep him awake, and lay squinting his eyes to meet the path
of rays running down from it to him. Then he shivered, and rose up with
a sudden start. The dull, rich dawn was hanging under the trees around
him, while the electric lamps, like paler moons now, still burned among
their tops. The sparrows bickered on the grass and the gravel of the
path around him.

He could not tell where he was at first; but presently he remembered,
and looked for his bag. It was gone; and the money was gone out of both
his pockets. He dropped back upon the seat, and leaning his head against
the back, he began to cry for utter despair. He had hardly ever cried
since he was a baby; and he would not have done it now, but there was no
one there to see him.

When he had his cry out he felt a little better, and he got up and went
to the pond in the hollow, and washed his hands and face, and wiped
them on the handkerchief his mother had ironed for him to use at the
minister's; it was still in the folds she had given it. As he shook it
out, rising up, he saw that people were asleep on all the benches round
the pond; he looked hopelessly at them to see if any of them were those
fellows, but he could not find them. He seemed to be the only person
awake on the Common, and wandered out of it and down through the empty
streets, filled at times with the moony light of the waning electrics,
and at times merely with the grey dawn. A man came along putting out
the gas, and some milk-carts rattled over the pavement. By and by a
market-wagon, with the leaves and roots of cabbages sticking out from
the edges of the canvas that covered it, came by, and Lemuel followed
it; he did not know what else to do, and it went so slow that he could
keep up, though the famine that gnawed within him was so sharp sometimes
that he felt as if he must fall down. He was going to drop into a
doorway and rest, but when he came to it he found on an upper step a
man folded forward like a limp bundle, snoring in a fetid, sodden sleep,
and, shocked into new strength, he hurried on. At last the wagon came to
a place that he saw was a market. There were no buyers yet, but men
were flitting round under the long arcades of the market-houses, with
lanterns under their arms, among boxes and barrels of melons, apples,
potatoes, onions, beans, carrots, and other vegetables, which the
country carts as they arrived continually unloaded. The smell of peaches
and cantaloupes filled the air, and made Lemuel giddy as he stood and
looked at the abundance. The men were not saying much; now and then one
of them priced something, the owner pretended to figure on it, and then
they fell into a playful scuffle, but all silently. A black cat lay
luxuriously asleep on the canvas top of a barrel of melons, and the man
who priced the melons asked if the owner would throw the cat in. There
was a butcher's cart laden with carcasses of sheep, and one of the men
asked the butcher if he called that stuff mutton. “No; imitation,” said
the butcher. They all seemed to be very good-natured. Lemuel thought he
would ask for an apple; but he could not.

The neighbouring restaurants began to send forth the smell of breakfast,
and he dragged up and down till he could bear it no longer, and then
went into one of them, meaning to ask for some job by which he could pay
for a meal. But his shame again would not let him. He looked at the
fat, white-aproned boy drawing coffee hot from a huge urn, and serving a
countryman with a beefsteak. It was close and sultry in there; the open
sugar-bowl was black with flies, and a scent of decaying meat came from
the next cellar. “Like some nice fresh dough-nuts?” said the boy to
Lemuel. He did not answer; he looked around as if he had come in search
of some one. Then he went out, and straying away from the market, he
found himself after a while in a street that opened upon the Common.

He was glad to sit down, and he said to himself that now he would stay
there, and keep a good lookout for the chaps that had robbed him. But
again he fell asleep, and he did not wake now till the sun was high, and
the paths of the Common were filled with hurrying people. He sat where
he had slept, for he did not know what else to do or where to go.
Sometimes he thought he would go to Mr. Sewell, and ask him for money
enough to get home; but he could not do it; he could more easily starve.

After an hour or two he went to get a drink at a fountain he saw a
little way off, and when he came back some people had got his seat. He
started to look for another, and on his way he found a cent in the path,
and he bought an apple with it--a small one that the dealer especially
picked out for cheapness. It seemed pretty queer to Lemuel that a person
should want anything for one apple. The apple when he ate it made
him sick. His head began to ache, and it ached all day. Late in the
afternoon he caught sight of one of those fellows at a distance; but
there was no policeman near. Lemuel called out, “Stop there, you!” but
the fellow began to run when he recognised Lemuel, and the boy was too
weak and faint to run after him.

The day wore away and the evening came again, and he had been
twenty-four hours houseless and without food. He must do something; he
could not stand it any longer; there was no sense in it. He had read in
the newspapers how they gave soup at the police-stations in Boston
in the winter; perhaps they gave something in summer. He mustered up
courage to ask a gentleman who passed where the nearest station was,
and then started in search of it. If the city gave it, then there was no
disgrace in it, and Lemuel had as much right to anything that was going
as other people; that was the way he silenced his pride.

But he missed the place; he must have gone down the wrong street from
Tremont to Washington; the gentleman had said the street that ran along
the Common was Tremont, and the next was Washington. The cross-street
that Lemuel got into was filled with people, going and coming, and
lounging about. There were girls going along two or three together with
books under their arms, and other girls talking with young fellows who
hung about the doors of brightly lighted shops, and flirting with them.
One of the girls, whom he had seen the day before in the Common, turned
upon Lemuel as he passed, and said, “There goes my young man _now_! Good
evening, Johnny!” It made Lemuel's cheek burn; he would have liked to
box her ears for her. The fellows all set up a laugh.

Towards the end of the street the crowd thickened, and there the mixture
of gas and the white moony lights that glared higher up, and winked and
hissed, shone upon the faces of a throng that had gathered about the
doors and windows of a store a little way down the other street. Lemuel
joined them, and for pure listlessness waited round to see what they
were looking at. By and by he was worked inward by the shifting and
changing of the crowd, and found himself looking in at the door of
a room, splendidly fitted up with mirrors and marble everywhere, and
coloured glass and carved mahogany. There was a long counter with three
men behind it, and over their heads was a large painting of a woman,
worse than that image in the garden. The men were serving out liquor to
the people that stood around drinking and smoking, and battening on this
picture. Lemuel could not help looking, either. “What place is this?” he
asked of the boy next him.

“Why, don't you know?” said the boy. “It's Jimmy Baker's. Just opened.”

“Oh,” said Lemuel. He was not going to let the boy see that he did not
know who Jimmy Baker was. Just then something caught his eye that had a
more powerful charm for him than that painting. It was a large bowl at
the end of the counter, which had broken crackers in it, and near it
were two plates, one with cheese, and one with bits of dried fish and
smoked meat. The sight made the water come into his mouth; he watched
like a hungry dog, with a sympathetic working of the jaws, the men who
took a bit of fish, or meat, or cheese, and a cracker, or all four of
them, before or after they drank. Presently one of the crowd near him
walked in and took some fish and cracker without drinking at all; he
merely winked at one of the bartenders, who winked at him in return.

A tremendous tide of daring rose in Lemuel's breast. He was just going
to go in and risk the same thing himself, when a voice in the crowd
behind him said, “Hain't you had 'most enough, young feller? Some the
rest of us would like a chance to see now.”

Lemuel knew the voice, and turning quickly, he knew the impudent face
it belonged to. He did not mind the laugh raised at his expense, but
launched himself across the intervening spectators, and tried to seize
the scamp who had got his money from him. The scamp had recognised
Lemuel too, and he fell back beyond his grasp, and then lunged through
the crowd, and tore round the corner and up the street. Lemuel followed
as fast as he could. In spite of the weakness he had felt before, wrath
and the sense of wrong lent him speed, and he was gaining in the chase
when he heard a girl's voice, “There goes one of them now!” and then a
man seemed to be calling after him, “Stop, there!” He turned round, and
a policeman, looking gigantic in his belted blue flannel blouse and his
straw helmet, bore down upon the country boy with his club drawn, and
seized him by the collar.

“You come along,” he said.

“I haven't done anything,” said Lemuel, submitting, as he must, and in
his surprise and terror losing the strength his wrath had given him. He
could scarcely drag his feet over the pavement, and the policeman had
almost to carry him at arm's length.

A crowd had gathered about them, and was following Lemuel and
his captor, but they fell back when they reached the steps of the
police-station, and Lemuel was pulled up alone, and pushed in at the
door. He was pushed through another door, and found himself in a kind
of office. A stout man in his shirt-sleeves was sitting behind a desk
within a railing, and a large book lay open on the desk. This man, whose
blue waistcoat with brass buttons marked him for some sort of officer,
looked impersonally at Lemuel and then at the officer, while he chewed
a quill toothpick, rolling it in his lips. “What have you got there?” he
asked.

“Assaulting a girl down here, and grabbing her satchel,” said the
officer who had arrested Lemuel, releasing his collar and going to the
door, whence he called, “You come in here, lady,” and a young girl, her
face red with weeping and her hair disordered, came back with him. She
held a crumpled straw hat with the brim torn loose, and in spite of her
disordered looks she was very pretty, with blue eyes flung very wide
open, and rough brown hair, wavy and cut short, almost like a boy's.
This Lemuel saw in the frightened glance they exchanged.

“This the fellow that assaulted you?” asked the man at the desk, nodding
his head toward Lemuel, who tried to speak; but it was like a nightmare;
he could not make any sound.

“There were three of them,” said the girl with hysterical volubility.
“One of them pulled my hat down over my eyes and tore it, and one of
them held me by the elbows behind, and they grabbed my satchel away that
had a book in it that I had just got out of the library. I hadn't got it
more than----”

“What name?” asked the man at the desk.

_“A Young Man's Darling,”_ said the girl, after a bashful hesitation.
Lemuel had read that book just before he left home; he had not thought
it was much of a book.

“The captain wants to know your name,” said the officer in charge of
Lemuel.

“Oh,” said the girl, with mortification. “Statira Dudley.”

“What age?” asked the captain.

“Nineteen last June,” replied the girl with eager promptness, that must
have come from shame from the blunder she had made. Lemuel was twenty,
the 4th of July.

“Weight?” pursued the captain.

“Well, I hain't been weighed very _lately_,” answered the girl, with
increasing interest. “I don't know as I been weighed since I left home.”

The captain looked at her judicially.

“That so? Well, you look pretty solid. Guess I'll put you down at a
hundred and twenty.”

“Well, I guess it's full as _much_ as that,” said the girl, with a
flattered laugh.

“Dunno how high you are?” suggested the captain, glancing at her again.

“Well, yes, I _do_. I am just five feet two inches and a half.”

“You don't look it,” said the captain critically.

“Well, I _am_,” insisted the girl, with a returning gaiety.

The captain apparently checked himself and put on a professional
severity.

“What business--occupation?”

“Sales-lady,” said the girl.

“Residence?”

“No. 2334 Pleasant Avenue.”

The captain leaned back in his arm-chair, and turned his toothpick
between his lips, as he stared hard at the girl.

“Well, now,” he said, after a moment, “you know you've got to come into
court and testify to-morrow morning.”

“Yes,” said the girl, rather falteringly, with a sidelong glance at
Lemuel.

“You've got to promise to do it, or else it will be my duty to have you
locked up overnight.”

“Have me locked up?” gasped the girl, her wide blue eyes filling with
astonishment.

“Detain you as a witness,” the captain explained. “Of course, we
shouldn't put you in a cell; we should give you a good room, and if you
ain't sure you'll appear in the morning----”

The girl was not of the sort whose tongues are paralysed by terror. “Oh,
I'll be _sure_ to appear, captain! Indeed I will, captain! You needn't
lock me up, captain! Lock me _up!_” she broke off indignantly. “It would
be a _pretty_ idea if I was first to be robbed of my satchel and then
put in prison for it overnight! A great kind of law _that_ would be!
Why, I never heard of such a thing! I think it's a perfect shame! I want
to know if that's the way you do with poor things that you don't know
about?”

“That's about the size of it,” said the captain, permitting himself a
smile, in which the officer joined.

“Well, it's a shame!” cried the girl, now carried far beyond her
personal interest in the matter.

The captain laughed outright. “It _is_ pretty rough. But what you going
to do?”

“Do? Why, I'd----” But here she stopped for want of science, and added
from emotion, “I'd do _any_thing before I'd do that.”

“Well,” said the captain, “then I understand you'll come round to the
police court and give your testimony in the morning?”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a vague, compassionate glance at Lemuel, who
had stood there dumb throughout the colloquy.

“If you don't, I shall have to send for you,” said the captain.

“Oh, I'll _come_,” replied the girl, in a sort of disgust, and her eyes
still dwelt upon Lemuel.

“That's all,” returned the captain, and the girl, accepting her
dismissal, went out.

Now that it was too late, Lemuel could break from his nightmare. “Oh,
don't let her go! I ain't the one! I was running after a fellow that
passed off a counterfeit ten-dollar bill on me in the Common yesterday.
I never touched her satchel. I never saw her before----”

“What's that?” demanded the captain sharply.

“You've got the wrong one!” cried Lemuel. “I never did anything to the
girl.”

“Why, you fool!” retorted the captain angrily; “why didn't you say that
when she was here, instead of standing there like a dumb animal? Heigh?”

Lemuel's sudden flow of speech was stopped at its source again. His lips
were locked; he could not answer a word.

The captain went on angrily. “If you'd spoke up in time, may be I might
'a' let you go. I don't want to do a man any harm if I can't do him some
good. Next time, if you've got a tongue in your head, use it. I can't do
anything for you now. I got to commit you.”

He paused between his sentences, as if to let Lemuel speak, but the boy
said nothing. The captain pulled his book impatiently toward him, and
took up his pen.

“What's your name?”

“Lemuel Barker.”

“I thought may be there was a mistake all the while,” said the captain
to the officer, while he wrote down Lemuel's name. “But if a man hain't
got sense enough to speak for himself, I can't put the words in his
mouth. Age?” he demanded savagely of Lemuel.

“Twenty.”

“Weight?”

“A hundred and thirty.”

“I could see with half an eye that the girl wan't very sanguine about
it. But what's the use? I couldn't tell her she was mistaken. Height?”

“Five feet six.”

“Occupation?”

“I help mother carry on the farm.”

“Just as I expected!” cried the captain. “Slow as a yoke of oxen.
Residence?”

“Willoughby Pastures.”

The captain could not contain himself. “Well, Willoughby Pastures,--or
whatever your name is,--you'll get yourself into the papers _this_
time, _sure_. And I must say it serves you right. If you can't speak for
yourself, who's going to speak for you, do you suppose? Might send round
to the girl's house----No, she wouldn't be there, ten to one. You've got
to go through now. Next time don't be such an infernal fool.”

The captain blotted his book and shut it.

“We'll have to lock him up here to-night,” he said to the policeman.
“Last batch has gone round. Better go through him.” But Lemuel had
been gone through before, and the officer's search of his pockets only
revealed their emptiness. The captain struck a bell on his desk. “If it
ain't all right, you can make it right with the judge in the morning,”
 he added to Lemuel.

Lemuel looked up at the policeman who had arrested him. He was an
elderly man, with a kindly face, squarely fringed with a chin-beard. The
boy tried to speak, but he could only repeat, “I never saw her before. I
never touched her.”

The policeman looked at him and then at the captain.

“Too late now,” said the latter. “Got to go through the mill this time.
But if it ain't right, you can make it right.”

Another officer had answered the bell, and the captain indicated with a
comprehensive roll of his head that he was to take Lemuel away and lock
him up.

“Oh, my!” moaned the boy. As they passed the door of a small room
opening on an inner corridor, a smell of coffee gushed out of it; the
officer stopped, and Lemuel caught sight of two gentlemen in the room
with a policeman, who was saying----

“Get a cup of coffee here when we want it. Try one?” he suggested
hospitably.

“No, thank you,” said one of the gentlemen, with the bland
respectfulness of people being shown about an institution. “How many of
you are attached to this station?”

“Eighty-one,” said the officer. “Largest station in town. Gang goes on
at one in the morning, and another at eight, and another at six P.M.” He
looked inquiringly at the officer in charge of Lemuel.

“Any matches?” asked this officer.

“Everything but money,” said the other, taking some matches out of his
waistcoat pocket.

Lemuel's officer went ahead, lighting the gas along the corridor, and
the boy followed, while the other officer brought up the rear with the
visitor whom he was lecturing. They passed some neat rooms, each with
two beds in it, and he answered some question: “Tramps? Not much! Give
_them_ a _board_ when they're drunk; send 'em round to the Wayfarers'
Lodge when they're sober. These officers' rooms.”

Lemuel followed his officer downstairs into a basement, where on either
side of a white-walled, brilliantly lighted, specklessly clean
corridor, there were numbers of cells, very clean, and smelling of fresh
whitewash. Each had a broad low shelf in it, and a bench opposite, a
little wider than a man's body. Lemuel suddenly felt himself pushed
into one of them, and then a railed door of iron was locked upon him.
He stood motionless in the breadth of light and lines of shade which the
gas-light cast upon him through the door, and knew the gentlemen were
looking at him as their guide talked.

“Well, fill up pretty well, Sunday nights. Most the arrests for
drunkenness. But all the arrests before seven o'clock sent to the City
Prison. Only keep them that come in afterwards.”

One of the gentlemen looked into the cell opposite Lemuel's. “There
seems to be only one bunk. Do you ever put more into a cell?”

“Well, hardly ever, if they're men. Lot o' women brought in 'most always
ask to be locked up together for company.”

“I don't see where they sleep,” said the visitor. “Do they lie on the
floor?”

The officer laughed. “Sleep? _They_ don't want to sleep. What they want
to do is to set up all night, and talk it over.”

Both of the visitors laughed.

“Some of the cells,” resumed the officer, “have two bunks, but we hardly
ever put more than one in a cell.”

The visitors noticed that a section of the rail was removed in each door
near the floor.

“That's to put a dipper of water through, or anything,” explained the
officer. “There!” he continued, showing them Lemuel's door; “see how
the rails are bent there? You wouldn't think a man could squeeze through
there, but we found a fellow half out o' that one night--backwards.
Captain came down with a rattan and made it hot for him.”

The visitors laughed, and Lemuel, in his cell, shuddered.

“I never saw anything so astonishingly clean,” said one of the
gentlemen. “And do you keep the gas burning here all night?”

“Yes; calculate to give 'em plenty of light,” said the officer, with
comfortable satisfaction in the visitor's complimentary tone.

“And the sanitary arrangements seem to be perfect, doctor,” said the
other visitor.

“Oh, perfect.”

“Yes,” said the officer, “we do the best we can for 'em.”

The visitors made a murmur of approbation. Their steps moved away;
Lemuel heard the guide saying, “Dunno what that fellow's in for. Find
out in the captain's room.”

“He didn't look like a very abandoned ruffian,” said one of the
visitors, with both pity and amusement in his voice.




VI.


Lemuel stood and leaned his head against the wall of his cell. The tears
that had come to his relief in the morning when he found that he was
robbed would not come now. He was trembling with famine and weakness,
but he could not lie down; it would be like accepting his fate, and
every fibre of his body joined his soul in rebellion against that. The
hunger gnawed him incessantly, mixed with an awful sickness.

After a long time a policeman passed his door with another prisoner, a
drunken woman, whom he locked into a cell at the end of the corridor.
When he came back, Lemuel could endure it no longer. “Say!” he called
huskily through his door. “Won't you give me a cup of that coffee
upstairs? I haven't had anything but an apple to eat for nearly two
days. I don't want you to _give_ me the coffee. You can take my clasp
button----”

The officer went by a few steps, then he came back, and peered in
through the door at Lemuel's face. “Oh! that's you?” he said: he was the
officer who had arrested Lemuel.

“Yes. Please get me the coffee. I'm afraid I shall have a fit of
sickness if I go much longer.”

“Well,” said the officer, “I guess I can get you something.” He went
away, and came back, after Lemuel had given up the hope of his return,
with a saucerless cup of coffee, and a slice of buttered bread laid on
the top of it. He passed it in through the opening at the bottom of the
door.

“Oh, my!” gasped the starving boy. He thought he should drop the cup,
his hand shook so when he took it. He gulped the coffee, and swallowed
the bread in a frenzy.

“Here--here's the button,” he said, as he passed the empty cup out to
the officer.

“I don't want your button,” answered the policeman. He hesitated a
moment. “I shall be round at the court in the morning, and I guess if it
ain't right we can make it so.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Lemuel, humbly grateful.

“You lay down now,” said the officer. “We shan't put anybody in on you
to-night.”

“I guess I better,” said Lemuel. He crept in upon the lower shelf, and
stretched himself out in his clothes, with his arm under his head for a
pillow. The drunken woman at the end of the corridor was clamouring to
get out. She wished to get out just half a minute, she said, and settle
with that hussy; then she would come back willingly. Sometimes she
sang, sometimes she swore; but with the coffee still sensibly hot in his
stomach, and the comfort of it in every vein, her uproar turned into an
agreeable fantastic medley for Lemuel, and he thought it was the folks
singing in church at Willoughby Pastures, and they were all asking him
who the new girl in the choir was, and he was saying Statira Dudley; and
then it all slipped off into a smooth, yellow nothingness, and he heard
some one calling him to get up.

When he woke in the morning he started up so suddenly that he struck
his head against the shelf above him, and lay staring stupidly at the
iron-work of his door.

He heard the order to turn out repeated at other cells along the
corridor, and he crept out of his shelf, and then sat down upon it,
waiting for his door to be unlocked. He was very hungry again, and he
trembled with faintness. He wondered how he should get his breakfast,
and he dreaded the trial in court less than the thought of going
through another day with nothing to eat. He heard the stir of the other
prisoners in the cells along the corridors, the low groans and sighs
with which people pull themselves together after a bad night; and he
heard the voice of the drunken woman, now sober, poured out in voluble
remorse, and in voluble promise of amendment for the future, to every
one who passed, if they would let her off easy. She said aisy, of
course, and it was in her native accent that she bewailed the fate of
the little ones whom her arrest had left motherless at home. No one
seemed to answer her, but presently she broke into a cry of joy and
blessing, and from her cell at the other end of the corridor came the
clink of crockery. Steps approached with several pauses, and at last
they paused at Lemuel's door, and a man outside stooped and pushed in,
through the opening at the bottom, a big bowl of baked beans, a quarter
of a loaf of bread, and a tin cup full of coffee. “Coffee's extra,” he
said jocosely. “Comes from the officers. You're in luck, young feller.”

“I ha'n't got anything to pay for it with,” faltered Lemuel.

“Guess they'll trust you,” said the man. “Any-rate, I got orders to
leave it.” He passed on, and Lemuel gathered up his breakfast, and
arranged it on the shelf where he had slept; then he knelt down before
it, and ate.

An hour later an officer came and unbolted his door from the outside.
“Hurry up,” he said; “Maria's waiting.”

“Maria?” repeated Lemuel innocently.

“Yes,” returned the officer. “Other name's Black. She don't like to
wait. Come out of here.”

Lemuel found himself in the corridor with four or five other prisoners,
whom some officers took in charge and conducted upstairs to the door of
the station. He saw no woman, but a sort of omnibus without windows was
drawn up at the curbstone.

“I thought,” he said to an officer, “that there was a lady waiting
to see me. Maria Black,” he added, seeing that the officer did not
understand.

The policeman roared, and could not help putting his head in at the
office door to tell the joke.

“Well, you must introduce him,” called a voice from within.

“Guess you ha'n't got the name exactly straight, young man,” said the
policeman to Lemuel, as he guarded him down the steps. “It's Black
Maria you're looking for. There she is,” he continued, pointing to
the omnibus, “and don't you forget it. She's particular to have folks
recognise her. She's blacker 'n she's painted.”

The omnibus was, in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with
salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with
the other prisoners, and locked in.

There were already several there, and as Lemuel's eyes accustomed
themselves to the light that came in through the little panes at the
sides of the roof, he could see that they were women; and by and by he
saw that two of them were the saucy girls who had driven him from his
seat in the Common that day, and laughed so at him. They knew him too,
and one of them set up a shrill laugh. “Hello, Johnny! That you? You
don't say so? What you up for _this_ time? Going down to the Island?
Well, give us a call there! Do be sociable! Ward 11's the address.” The
other one laughed, and then swore at the first for trying to push her
off the seat.

Lemuel broke out involuntarily in all the severity that was native to
him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

This convulsed the bold things with laughter. When they could get their
breath, one of them said, “Pshaw! I know what he's up for: preaching on
the Common. Say, young feller! don't you want to hold a prayer-meetin'
here?”

They burst into another shriek of laughter, so wild and shrill that the
driver rapped on the roof, and called down, “Dry up in there!”

“Oh, you mind your horses, and we'll look after the passengers. Go and
set on his knee, Jen, and cheer him up a little.”

Lemuel sat in a quiver of abhorrence. The girl appealed to remained
giggling beside her companion.

“I--I pity ye!” said Lemuel.

The Irishwoman had not stopped bewailing herself, and imploring right
and left an easy doom. She now addressed herself wholly to Lemuel, whose
personal dignity seemed to clothe him with authority in her eyes. She
told him about her children, left alone with no one to look after them;
the two little girls, the boy only three years old. When the van stopped
at a station to take in more passengers, she tried to get out--to tell
the gentlemen at the office about it, she said.

After several of these halts they stopped at the basement of a large
stone building, that had a wide flight of steps in front, and columns,
like the church at Willoughby Pastures, only the church steps were wood,
and the columns painted pine. Here more officers took charge of them,
and put them in a room where there were already twenty-five or thirty
other prisoners, the harvest of the night before; and presently another
van-load was brought in.

There were many women among them, but here there was no laughing or
joking as there had been in the van. Scarcely any one spoke, except the
Irishwoman, who crept up to an officer at the door from time to time,
and begged him to tell the judge to let her have it easy this time.
Lemuel could not help seeing that she and most of the others were
familiar with the place. Those two saucy jades who had mocked him were
silent, and had lost their bold looks.

After waiting what seemed a long time, the door was opened, and they
were driven up a flight of stairs into a railed enclosure at the corner
of a large room, where they remained huddled together, while a man at
a long desk rattled over something that ended with “God bless the
commonwealth of Massachusetts.” On a platform behind the speaker sat
a grey-haired man in spectacles, and Lemuel knew that he was in the
court-room, and that this must be the judge. He could not see much of
the room over the top of the railing, but there was a buzz of voices and
a stir of feet beyond, that made him think the place was full. But full
or empty, it was the same to him; his shame could not be greater or
less. He waited apathetically while the clerk read off the charges
against the vastly greater number of his fellow-prisoners arrested for
drunkenness. When these were disposed of, he read from the back of a
paper, which he took from a fresh pile, “Bridget Gallagher, complained
of for habitual drunkenness. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty, your honour,” answered the Irishwoman who had come from
Lemuel's station. “But make it aisy for me this time, judge, and ye'll
never catch me in it again. I've three helpless childer at home, your
honour, starvin' and cryin' for their mother. Holy Mary, make it aisy,
judge!”

A laugh went round the room, which a stern voice checked with “Silence,
there!” but which renewed itself when the old woman took the stand at
the end of the clerk's long desk, while a policeman mounted a similar
platform outside the rail, and gave his testimony against her. It was
very conclusive, and it was not affected by the denials with which the
poor woman gave herself away more and more. She had nothing to say
when invited to do so except to beg for mercy; the judge made a few
inquiries, apparently casual, of the policeman; then after a moment's
silence, in which he sat rubbing his chin, he leaned forward and said
quietly to the clerk,

“Give her three months.”

The woman gave a wild Irish cry, “O my poor childer!” and amidst the
amusement of the spectators, which the constables could not check at
once, was led wailing below.

Before Lemuel could get his breath those bold girls, one after the
other, were put upon the stand. The charge against them was not made
the subject of public investigation; the judge and some other elderly
gentleman talked it over together; and the girls, who had each wept in
pleading guilty, were put on probation, as Lemuel understood it, and,
weeping still and bridling a little, were left in charge of this elderly
gentleman, and Lemuel saw them no more.

One case followed another, and Lemuel listened with the fascination of
terror; the sentences seemed terribly severe, and out of all proportion
to the offences. Suddenly his own name was called. His name had been
called in public places before: at the school exhibitions, where he had
taken prizes in elocution and composition; in church, once, when the
minister had mentioned him for peculiar efficiency and zeal among other
Sabbath-school teachers. It was sacred to him for his father's sake,
who fell in the war, and who was recorded in it on the ugly, pathetic
monument on the village green; and hitherto he had made it respected and
even honoured, and had tried all the harder to keep it so because his
family was poor, and his mother had such queer ways and dressed so. He
dragged himself to the stand which he knew he must mount, and stole from
under his eyelashes a glance at the court-room, which took it all in.
There were some people, whom he did not know for reporters, busy with
their pencils next the railings; and there was a semicircular table in
the middle of the room at which a large number of policemen sat, and
they had their straw helmets piled upon it, with the hats of the lawyers
who sat among them. Beyond, the seats which covered the floor were
filled with the sodden loafers whom the law offers every morning the
best dramatic amusement in the city. Presently, among the stupid eyes
fixed upon him, Lemuel was aware of the eyes of that fellow who had
passed the counterfeit money on him; and when this scamp got up and
coolly sauntered out of the room, Lemuel was held in such a spell that
he did not hear the charge read against him, or the clerk's repeated
demand, “Guilty or not guilty?”

He was recalled to himself by the voice of the judge. “Young man, do
you understand? Are you guilty of assaulting this lady and taking her
satchel, or not?”

“Not guilty,” said Lemuel huskily; and he looked, not at the judge, but
at the pretty girl, who confronted him from a stand at the other end of
the clerk's desk, blushing to find herself there up to her wide-flung
blue eyes. Lemuel blushed too, and dropped his eyes; and it seemed to
him in a crazy kind of way that it was impolite to have pleaded not
guilty against her accusation. He stood waiting for the testimony which
the judge had to prompt her to offer.

“State the facts in regard to the assault,” he said gravely.

“I don't know as I can do it, very well,” began the girl.

“We shall be satisfied if you do your best,” said the judge, with
the glimmer of a smile, which spread to a laugh among the spectators,
unrebuked by the constables, since the judge had invited it.

In this atmosphere of sympathy the girl found her tongue, and with a
confiding twist, of her pretty head began again: “Well, now, I'll tell
you just how it was. I'd just got my book out of the Public Library, and
I was going down Neponset Street on my way home, hurrying along, because
I see it was beginning to be pretty late, and the first thing I know
somebody pulled my hat down over my eyes, and tore the brim half off, so
I don't suppose I can ever wear it again, it's such a lookin' thing; any
rate it ain't the one I've got on, though it's some like it; and then
the next thing, somebody grabbed away the satchel I'd got on my arm; and
as soon as I could get my eyes clear again, I see two fellows chasin' up
the street, and I told the officer somebody'd got my book; and I knew it
was one of those fellows runnin' away, and I said, 'There they go now,'
and the officer caught the hind one, and I guess the other one got away;
and the officer told me to follow along to the station-house, and when
we got there they took my name, and where I roomed, and my age----”

“Do you recognise this young man as one of the persons who robbed you?”
 interrupted the judge, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who now lifted
his head and looked his accuser fearlessly in her pretty eyes.

“Why, no!” she promptly replied. “The first thing I knew, he'd pulled my
hat over my eyes.”

“But you recognise him as one of those you saw running away?”

“Oh yes, he's one of _them_,” said the girl.

“What made you think he had robbed you?”

“Why, because my satchel was gone!” returned the girl, with logic that
apparently amused the gentlemen of the bar.

“But why did you think _he_ had taken it?”

“Because I see him running away.”

“You couldn't swear that he was the one who took your satchel?”

“Why, of course not! I didn't _see_ him till I saw him running. And I
don't know as he was the one, now,” added the girl, in a sudden burst of
generosity.

“And if it was to do over again, I should say as much to the officers at
the station. But I got confused when they commenced askin' me who I
was, and how much I weighed, and what my height was; and _he_ didn't say
anything; and I got to thinkin' may be it _was_; and when they told me
that if I didn't promise to appear at court in the morning they'd have
to lock me up, I was only too glad to get away alive.”

By this time all the blackguard audience were sharing, unchecked, the
amusement of the bar. The judge put up his hand to hide a laugh. Then he
said to Lemuel, “Do you wish to question the plaintiff?”

The two young things looked at each other, and both blushed. “No,” said
Lemuel.

The girl looked at the judge for permission, and at a nod from him left
the stand and sat down.

The officer who had arrested Lemuel took the stand on the other side
of the rail from him, and corroborated the girl's story; but he had not
seen the assault or robbery, and could not swear to either. Then Lemuel
was invited to speak, and told his story with the sort of nervous
courage that came to him in extremity. He told it from the beginning,
and his adventure with the two beats in the Common made the audience
laugh again. Even then, Lemuel could not see the fun of it; he stopped,
and the stout ushers in blue flannel sacks commanded silence. Then
Lemuel related how he had twice seen one of the beats since that time,
but he was ashamed to say how he had let him escape out of that very
room half an hour before. He told how he had found the beat in the crowd
before the saloon, and how he was chasing him up the street when he
heard the young lady hollo out, “There they go now!” and then the
officer arrested him.

The judge sat a moment in thought; then said quietly, “The charge is
dismissed;” and before Lemuel well knew what it meant, a gate was opened
at the stand, and he was invited to pass out. He was free. The officer
who had arrested him shook his hand in congratulation and excuse, and
the lawyers and the other policemen gave him a friendly glance. The
loafers and beats of the audience did not seem to notice him. They were
already intent upon a case of coloured assault and battery which had
been called, and which opened with the promise of uncommon richness,
both of the parties being women.

Lemuel saw that girl who had accused him passing down the aisle on the
other side of the room. She was with another girl, who looked older.
Lemuel walked fast, to get out of their way; he did not know why, but he
did not want to speak to the girl. They walked fast too, and when he got
down the stairs on to the ground floor of the courthouse they overtook
him.

“Say?” said the older girl, “I want to speak to _you_. I think it's a
down shame, the way that you've been treated; and Statira, she feels
jus' 's I do about it; and I tell her she's got to say so. It's the
least she can do, I tell her, after what she got you _in_ for. My name's
'Manda Grier; I room 'th S'tira; 'n' I come 'th her this mornin' t' help
keep her up; b't I _didn't_ know 't was goin' to be s'ch a _perfect_
flat-out!”

As the young woman rattled on she grew more and more glib; she was what
they call whopper-jawed, and spoke a language almost purely consonantal,
cutting and clipping her words with a rapid play of her whopper-jaw till
there was nothing but the bare bones left of them. Statira was crying,
and Lemuel could not bear to see her cry. He tried to say something to
comfort her, but all he could think of was, “I hope you'll get your book
back,” and 'Manda Grier answered for her----

“Oh, I guess 't ain't the book 't she cares for. S' far forth 's the
book goes, I guess she can afford to buy another book, well enough. B't
I tell her she's done 'n awful thing, and a thing 't she'll carry to her
grave 'th her, 'n't she'll remember to her dyin' day. That's what _I_
tell her.”

“She ha'n't got any call to feel bad about it,” said Lemuel clumsily.
“It was just a mistake.” Then, not knowing what more to say, he said,
being come to the outer door by this time, “Well, I wish you good
morning.”

“Well, good morning,” said 'Manda Grier, and she thrust her elbow
sharply into Statira Dudley's side, so that she also said faintly--

“Well, good morning!” She was fluent enough on the witness-stand and in
the police station, but now she could not find a word to say.

The three stood together on the threshold of the court-house, not
knowing how to get away from one another.

'Manda Grier put out her hand to Lemuel. He took it, and, “Well, good
morning,” he said again.

“Well, good morning,” repeated 'Manda Grier.

Then Statira put out her hand, and she and Lemuel shook hands, and said
together, “Well, good morning,” and on these terms of high civility they
parted. He went one way and they another. He did not look back, but the
two girls, marching off with locked arms and flying tongues, when they
came to the corner, turned to look back. They both turned inward, and so
bumped their heads together.

“Why, you--coot!” cried 'Manda Grier, and they broke out laughing.

Lemuel heard their laugh, and he knew they were laughing at him; but he
did not care. He wandered on, he did not know whither, and presently he
came to the only place he could remember.




VII.


The place was the Common, where his trouble had begun. He looked back to
the beginning, and could see that it was his own fault. To be sure, you
might say that if a fellow came along and offered to pay you fifty cents
for changing a ten-dollar bill, you had a right to take it; but there
was a voice in Lemuel's heart which warned him that greed to another's
hurt was sin, and that if you took too much for a thing from a
necessitous person, you oppressed and robbed him. You could make it
appear otherwise, but you could not really change the nature of the act.
He owned this with a sigh, and he owned himself justly punished. He was
still on those terms of personal understanding with the eternal spirit
of right which most of us lose later in life, when we have so often
seemed to see the effect fail to follow the cause, both in the case of
our own misdeeds and the misdeeds of others.

He sat down on a bench, and he sat there all day, except when he went to
drink from the tin cup dangling by the chain from the nearest fountain.
His good breakfast kept him from being hungry for a while, but he was
as aimless and as hopeless as ever, and as destitute. He would have gone
home now if he had had the money; he was afraid they would be getting
anxious about him there, though he had not made any particular promises
about the time of returning. He had dropped a postal card into a box as
soon as he reached Boston, to tell of his safe arrival, and they would
not expect him to write again.

There were only two ways for him to get home: to turn tramp and walk
back, or to go to that Mr. Sewell and borrow the money to pay his
passage. To walk home would add intolerably to the public shame he must
suffer, and the thought of going to Mr. Sewell was, even in the secret
which it would remain between him and the minister, a pang so cruel
to his pride that he recoiled from it instantly. He said to himself
he would stand it one day more; something might happen, and if nothing
happened, he should think of it again. In the meantime he thought of
other things: of that girl, among the rest, and how she looked at the
different times. As nearly as he could make out, she seemed to be a very
fashionable girl; at any rate, she was dressed fashionably, and she was
nice-looking. He did not know whether she had behaved very sensibly, but
he presumed she was some excited.

Toward dark, when Lemuel was reconciling himself to another night's
sleep in the open air, a policeman sauntered along the mall, and as he
drew nearer the boy recognised his friendly captor. He dropped his head,
but it was too late. The officer knew him, and stopped before him.

“Well,” he said, “hard at it, I see.”

Lemuel made no answer, but he was aware of a friendly look in the
officer's face, mixed with fatherly severity.

“I was in hopes you had started back to Willoughby Pastures before this.
You don't want to get into the habit of settin' round on the Common,
much. First thing you know you can't quit it. Where you goin' to put up
to-night?”

“I don't know,” murmured Lemuel.

“Got no friends in town you can go to?”

“No.”

“Well, now, look here! Do you think you could find your way back to the
station?”

“I guess so,” said Lemuel, looking up at the officer questioningly.

“Well, when you get tired of this, you come round, and we'll provide a
bed for you. And you get back home to-morrow, quick as you can.”

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. He was helpless against the advice and its
unjust implication, but he could not say anything.

“Get out o' Boston, anyway, wherever you go or don't go,” continued the
officer. “It's a bad place.”

He walked on, and left Lemuel to himself again. He thought bitterly that
no one knew better than himself how luridly wicked Boston was, and that
there was probably not a soul in it more helplessly anxious to get out
of it. He thought it hard to be talked to as if it were his fault; as if
he wished to become a vagrant and a beggar. He sat there an hour or two
longer, and then he took the officer's advice so far as concerned his
going to the station for a bed, swallowing his pride as he must. He
must do that, or he must go to Mr. Sewell. It was easier to accept
humiliation at the hands of strangers. He found his way there with
some difficulty, and slinking in at the front door, he waited at the
threshold of the captain's room while he and two or three officers
disposed of a respectably dressed man, whom a policeman was holding up
by the collar of his coat. They were searching his pockets and taking
away his money, his keys, and his pencil and penknife, which the captain
sealed up in a large envelope, and put into his desk.

“There! take him and lock him up. He's pretty well loaded,” said the
captain.

Then he looked up and saw Lemuel. “Hello! Can't keep away, eh?” he
demanded jocosely. “Well, we've heard about you. I told you the judge
would make it all right. What's wanted? Bed? Well, here!” The captain
filled up a blank which he took from a pigeon-hole, and gave it to
Lemuel. “I guess that'll fix you out for the night. And tomorrow you put
back to Willoughby Pastures tight as you can get there. You're on the
wrong track now. First thing you know you'll be a professional tramp,
and then you won't be worth the powder to blow you. I use plain talk
with you because you're a beginner. I wouldn't waste my breath on that
fellow behind you.”

Lemuel looked round, and almost touched with his a face that shone fiery
red through the rusty growth of a week's beard, and recoiled from a
figure that was fouler as to shirt and coat and trousers than anything
the boy had seen; though the tramps used to swarm through Willoughby
Pastures before the Selectmen began to lock them up in the town
poorhouse and set them to breaking stone. There was no ferocity in the
loathsome face; it was a vagrant swine that looked from it, no worse in
its present mood than greedy and sleepy.

“Bed?” demanded the captain, writing another blank. “Never been here
before, I suppose?” he continued with good-natured irony. “I don't seem
to remember you.”

The captain laughed, and the tramp returned a husky “Thank you, sir,”
 and took himself off into the street.

Then the captain came to Lemuel's help. “You follow him,” he said, “and
you'll come to a bed by and by.”

He went out, and, since he could do no better, did as he was bid. He
had hardly ever seen a drunken man at Willoughby Pastures, where the
prohibition law was strictly enforced; there was no such person as a
thief in the whole community, and the tramps were gone long ago.
Yet here was he, famed at home for the rectitude of his life and the
loftiness of his aims, consorting with drunkards and thieves and tramps,
and warned against what he was doing by a policeman, as if he was
doing it of his own will. It was very strange business. If it was all
a punishment for taking that fellow's half-dollar, it was pretty heavy
punishment. He was not going to say that it was unjust, but he would
say it was hard. His spirit was now so bruised and broken that he hardly
knew what to think.

He followed the tramp as far off as he could and still keep him in
sight, and he sometimes thought he had lost him, in the streets that
climbed and crooked beyond the Common towards the quarter whither they
were going; but he reappeared, slouching and shambling rapidly on, in
the glare of some electric lights that stamped the ground with shadows
thick and black as if cut in velvet or burnt into the surface. Here
and there some girl brushed against the boy, and gave him a joking
or jeering word; her face flashed into light for a moment, and then
vanished in the darkness she passed into. It was that hot October, and
the night was close and still; on the steps of some of the houses groups
of fat, weary women were sitting, and children were playing on the
sidewalks, using the lamp-posts for goal or tag. The tramp ahead of
Lemuel issued upon a brilliantly lighted little square, with a great
many horse-cars coming and going in it; a church with stores on the
ground floor, and fronting it on one side a row of handsome old
stone houses with iron fences, and on another a great hotel, with a
high-pillared portico, where men sat talking and smoking.

People were waiting on the sidewalk to take the cars; a druggist's
window threw its mellow lights into the street; from open cellarways
came the sound of banjos and violins. At one of these cellar doors his
guide lingered so long that Lemuel thought he should have to find the
way beyond for himself. But the tramp suddenly commanded himself from
the music, the light, and the smell of strong drink, which Lemuel caught
a whiff of as he followed, and turning a corner led the way to the side
of a lofty building in a dark street, where they met other like shapes
tending toward it from different directions.




VIII.


Lemuel entered a lighted doorway from a bricked courtyard, and found
himself with twenty or thirty houseless comrades in a large, square
room, with benching against the wall for them to sit on. They were all
silent and quelled-looking, except a young fellow whom Lemuel sat down
beside, and who, ascertaining that he was a new-comer, seemed disposed
to do the honours of the place. He was not daunted by the reserve native
to Lemuel, or by that distrust of strangers which experience had so soon
taught him. He addressed him promptly as mate, and told him that the
high, narrow, three-sided tabling in the middle of the room was where
they would get their breakfast, if they lived.

“And I guess I shall live,” he said. “I notice I 'most always live till
breakfast-time, whatever else I do, or I don't do; but sometimes it
don't seem as if I _could_ saw my way through that quarter of a cord
of wood.” At a glance of inquiry which Lemuel could not forbear, he
continued: “What I mean by a quarter of a cord of wood is that they let
you exercise that much free in the morning, before they give you your
breakfast: it's the doctor's orders. This used to be a school-house, but
it's in better business now. They got a kitchen under here, that beats
the Parker House; you'll smell it pretty soon. No whacking on the
knuckles here any more. All serene, I tell you. You'll see. I don't know
how I should got along without this institution, and I tell the manager
so, every time I see him. That's him, hollering 'Next,' out of that room
there. It's a name he gives all of us; he knows it's a name we'll answer
to. Don't you forget it when it comes your turn.”

He was younger than Lemuel, apparently, but his swarthy, large-mouthed,
droll eyed face affirmed the experience of a sage. He wore a blue
flannel shirt, with loose trousers belted round his waist, and he
crushed a soft felt hat between his hands; his hair was clipped close
to his skull, and as he rubbed it now and then it gave out a pleasant
rasping sound.

The tramps disappeared in the order of their vicinity to the manager's
door, and it came in time to this boy and Lemuel.

“You come along with me,” he said, “and do as I do.” When they entered
the presence of the manager, who sat at a desk, Lemuel's guide nodded to
him, and handed over his order for a bed.

“Ever been here before?” asked the manager, as if going through the form
for a joke.

“Never.” He took a numbered card which the manager gave him, and stood
aside to wait for Lemuel, who made the same answer to the same question,
and received his numbered card.

“Now,” said the young fellow, as they passed out of another door, “we
ain't either of us 'Next,' any more. I'm Thirty-nine, and you're
Forty, and don't you forget it. All right, boss,” he called back to
the manager; “I'll take care of him! This way,” he said to Lemuel. “The
reason why I said I'd never been here before,” he explained on the way
down, “was because you got to say something, when he asks you. Most of
'em says last fall or last year, but I say never, because it's just
as true, and he seems to like it better. We're going down to the
dressing-room now, and then we're going to take a bath. Do you know
why?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Because we can't help it. It's the doctor's orders. He thinks it's the
best thing you can do, just before you go to bed.”

The basement was brightly lighted with gas everywhere, and a savoury
odour of onion-flavoured broth diffused itself through the whole place.

“Smell it? You might think that was supper, but it ain't. It's
breakfast. You got a bath and a night's rest as well as the quarter of a
cord of wood between you and that stew. Hungry?”

“Not very,” said Lemuel faintly.

“Because if you say you are they'll give you all the bread and water you
can hold, now. But I ruther wait.”

“I guess I don't want anything to-night,” said Lemuel, shrinking from
the act of beggary.

“Well, I guess you won't lose anything in the long run,” said the other.
“You'll make it up at breakfast.”

They turned into a room where eight or ten tramps were undressing; some
of them were old men, quite sodden and stupefied with a life of vagrancy
and privation; others were of a dull or cunning middle-age, two or three
were as young as Lemuel and his partner, and looked as if they might be
poor fellows who had found themselves in a strange city without money
or work. But it was against them that they had known where to come for a
night's shelter, Lemuel felt.

There were large iron hooks hanging from the walls and ceiling, and his
friend found the numbers on two of them corresponding to those given
Lemuel and himself, and brass checks which they hung around their necks.

“You got to hang your things on that hook, all but your shoes and
stockings, and you got to hang on to _them_, yourself. Forty's your
number, and forty's your hook, and they give you the clothes off'n it in
the morning.”

He led the way through the corridor into a large room where a row
of bath-tubs flanked the wall, half of them filled with bathers, who
chatted in tones of subdued cheerfulness under the pleasant excitement
of unlimited hot and cold water. As each new-comer appeared, a black
boy, perched on a windowsill, jumped down and dashed his head from a
large bottle which he carried.

“Free shampoo,” explained Lemuel's mate. “Doctor's orders. Only you have
to do the rubbing yourself. I don't suppose _you_ need it, but some the
pardners here couldn't sleep without it,” he continued, as Lemuel
shrank a little from the bottle, and then submitted. “It's a regular
night-cap.”

The tramps recognised the humour of the explanation by a laugh, intended
to be respectful to the establishment in its control, which spread along
their line, and the black boy grinned.

“There ain't anything mean about the Wayfarer's Hotel,” said the mate,
and they all laughed again, a little louder.

Each man, having dried himself from his bath, was given a coarse linen
night-gown; sometimes it was not quite whole, but it was always clean;
and then he gathered up his shoes and stockings and went out.

“Hold on a minute,” said the mate to Lemuel, when they left the
bath-room. “You ought to see the kitchen,” and in his night-gown,
with his shoes in his hand, he led Lemuel to the open door which that
delicious smell of broth came from. A vast copper-topped boiler was
bubbling within, and trying to get its lid off. The odour made Lemuel
sick with hunger.

“Refrigerator in the next room,” the mate lectured on. “Best beef-chucks
in the market; fish for Fridays--we don't make any man go against his
religion, in _this_ house; pots of butter as big as a cheese,--none of
your oleomargarine,--the real thing, every time; potatoes and onions
and carrots laying around on the floor; barrels of hard-tack; and bread,
like sponge,--bounce you up if you was to jump on it,--baked by the
women at the Chardon Street Home--oh, I tell you we do things in style
here.”

A man who sat reading a newspaper in the corner looked up sharply.
“Hello, there! what's wanted?”

“Just dropped in to wish you good night, Jimmy,” said Lemuel's mate.

“You clear out!” said the man good-humouredly, as if to an old
acquaintance, who must not be allowed to presume upon his familiarity.

“All right, Jimmy,” said the boy. He set his left hand horizontally on
its wrist at his left shoulder and cut the air with it in playful menace
as the man dropped his eyes again to his paper. “They're all just so,
in this house,” he explained to Lemuel. “No nonsense, but good-natured.
_They're_ all right. They know me.”

He mounted two flights of stairs in front of Lemuel to a corridor, where
an attendant stood examining the numbers on the brass checks hung
around tramps' necks as they came up with their shoes in their hands. He
instructed them that the numbers corresponded to the cots they were
to occupy, as well as the hooks where their clothes hung. Some of them
seemed hardly able to master the facts. They looked wistfully, like
cowed animals, into his face as he made the case clear.

Two vast rooms, exquisitely clean, like the whole house, opened on the
right and left of the corridor, and presented long phalanxes of cots,
each furnished with two coarse blankets, a quilt, and a thin pillow.

“Used to be school-rooms,” said Lemuel's mate, in a low tone.

“Cots thirty-nine and forty,” said the attendant, looking at their
checks. “Right over there, in the corner.”

“Come along,” said the mate, leading the way, with the satisfaction of
an _habitué_. “Best berth in the room, and about the last they reach in
the morning. You see, they got to take us as we come, when they call us,
and the last feller in at night's the first feller out in the morning,
because his bed's the nearest the door.”

He did not pull down the blankets of his cot at once, but stretched
himself out in the quilt that covered them. “Cool off a little, first,”
 he explained. “Well, this is what I call comfort, mate, heigh?”

Lemuel did not answer. He was watching the attendant with a group of
tramps who could not find their cots.

“Can't read, I suppose,” said the mate, a little disdainfully. “Well,
look at that old chap, will you!” A poor fellow was fumbling with his
blankets, as if he did not know quite how to manage them. The attendant
had to come to his help, and tuck him in. “Well, there!” exclaimed the
mate, lifting himself on his elbow to admire the scene. “I don't suppose
he's ever been in a decent bed before. Hayloft's _his_ style, or a
board-pile.” He sank down again, and went on: “Well, you do see all
kinds of folks here, that's a fact. Sorry there ain't more in to-night,
so 's to give you a specimen. You ought to be here in the winter. Well,
it ain't so lonesome now, in summer, as it used to be. Sometimes I used
to have nearly the whole place to myself, summer nights, before they got
to passin' these laws against tramps in the country, and lockin' 'em
up when they ketched 'em. That drives 'em into the city summers, now;
because they're always sure of a night's rest and a day's board here if
they ask for it. But winter's the time. You'll see all these cots full,
then. They let on the steam-heat, and it's comfortable; and it's always
airy and healthy.” The vast room was, in fact, perfectly ventilated,
and the poor who housed themselves that night, and many well-to-do
sojourners in hotels, had reason to envy the vagrants their free
lodging.

The mate now got under his quilt, and turned his face toward Lemuel,
with one hand under his cheek. “They don't let _every_body into this
room, 's I was tellin' ye. This room is for the big-bugs, you know.
Sometimes a drunk will get in, though, in spite of everything. Why, I've
seen a drunk at the station-house, when I've been gettin' my order for a
bed, stiffen up so 't the captain himself thought he was sober; and then
I've followed him round here, wobblin' and corkscrewin' all over the
sidewalk; and then I've seen him stiffen up in the office again, and go
through his bath like a little man, and get into bed as drunk as a fish;
and may be wake up in the night with the man with the poker after him,
and make things hum. Well, sir, one night there was a drunk in here that
thought the man with the poker was after him, and he just up and jumped
out of this window behind you--three stories from the ground.”

Lemuel could not help lifting himself in bed to look at it. “Did it kill
him?” he asked. “Kill him? _No_! You can't kill a _drunk_. One night
there was a drunk got loose, here, and he run downstairs into the
wood-yard, and he got hold of an axe down there, and it took five men to
get that axe away from that drunk. He was goin' for the snakes.”

“The snakes,” repeated Lemuel. “Are there snakes in the wood-yard?”

The other gave a laugh so loud that the attendant called out, “Less
noise over there!”

“I'll tell you about the snakes in the morning,” said the mate; and he
turned his face away from Lemuel.

The stories of the drunks had made Lemuel a little anxious; but he
thought that attendant would keep a sharp lookout, so that there would
not really be much danger. He was very drowsy from his bath, in spite of
the hunger that tormented him, but he tried to keep awake and think what
he should do after breakfast.




IX.


“Come, turn out!” said a voice in his ear, and he started up, to see the
great dormitory where he had fallen asleep empty of all but himself and
his friend.

“Make out a night's rest?” asked the latter. “Didn't I tell you we'd
be the last up? Come along!” He preceded Lemuel, still drowsy, down the
stairs into the room where they had undressed, and where the tramps were
taking each his clothes from their hook, and hustling them on.

“What time is it, Johnny?” asked Lemuel's mate of the attendant. “I left
my watch under my pillow.”

“Five o'clock,” said the man, helping the poor old fellow who had not
known how to get into bed to put on his clothes.

“Well, that's a pretty good start,” said the other. He finished his
toilet by belting himself around the waist, and “Come along, mate,” he
said to Lemuel. “I'll show you the way to the tool-room.”

He led him through the corridor into a chamber of the basement where
there were bright rows of wood-saws, and ranks of saw-horses, with
heaps of the latter in different stages of construction. “House
self-supporting, as far as it can. We don't want to be beholden to
anybody if we can help it. We make our own horses here; but we can't
make our saws, or we would. Ever had much practice with the woodsaw?”

“No,” said Lemuel, with a throb of home-sickness, that brought back the
hacked log behind the house, and the axe resting against it; “we always
chopped our stove-wood.”

“Yes, that's the way in the country. Well, now,” said the other, “I'll
show you how to choose a saw. Don't you be took in by no new saw because
it's bright, and looks pretty. You want to take a saw that's been filed,
and filed away till it ain't more 'n an inch and a half deep; and then
you want to tune it up, just so,--like a banjo--not too tight, and not
too slack,--and then it'll slip through a stick o' wood like--lyin'.” He
selected a saw, and put it in order for Lemuel. “There!” He picked out
another. “Here's _my_ old stand-by!” He took up a saw-horse, at random,
to indicate that one need not be critical in that, and led through the
open door into the wood-yard, where a score or two of saws were already
shrilling and wheezing through the wood.

It was a wide and lofty shed, with piles of cord-wood and slabs at
either end, and walled on the farther side with kindling, sawed, split,
and piled up with admirable neatness. The place gave out the sweet smell
of the woods from the bark of the logs and from the fresh section of
their grain. A double rank of saw-horses occupied the middle space, and
beside each horse lay a quarter of a cord of wood, at which the men were
toiling in sullen silence for the most part, only exchanging a grunt or
snarl of dissatisfaction with one another.

“Morning, mates,” said Lemuel's friend cheerfully, as he entered the
shed, and put his horse down beside one of the piles. “Thought we'd look
in and see how you was gettin' along. Just stepped round from the Parker
House while our breakfast was a-cookin'. Hope you all rested well?”

The men paused, with their saws at different slopes in the wood, and
looked round. The night before, in the nakedness in which Lemuel had
first seen them, the worst of them had the inalienable comeliness of
nature, and their faces, softened by their relation to their bodies,
were not so bad; they were not so bad, looking from their white
nightgowns; but now, clad in their filthy rags, and caricatured out of
all native dignity by their motley and misshapen attire, they were a
hideous gang, and all the more hideous for the grin that overspread
their stubbly muzzles at the boy's persiflage.

“Don't let me interrupt you, fellows,” he said, flinging a log upon his
horse, and dashing his saw gaily into it. “Don't mind _me!_ I know you
hate to lose a minute of this fun; I understand just how you feel about
it, and I don't want you to stand upon ceremony with _me._ Treat me just
like one of yourselves, gents. This beechwood is the regular Nova
Scotia thing, ain't it? Tough and knotty! I can't bear any of your cheap
wood-lot stuff from around here. What I want is Nova Scotia wood, every
time. Then I feel that I'm gettin' the worth of my money.” His log
dropped apart on each side of his horse, and he put on another. “Well,
mates,” he rattled on, “this is lovely, ain't it? I wouldn't give up
my little quarter of a cord of green Nova Scotia before breakfast for
anything; I've got into the way of it, and I can't live without it.”

The tramps chuckled at these ironies, and the attendant who looked into
the yard now and then did not interfere with them.

The mate went through his stint as rapidly as he talked, and he had
nearly finished before Lemuel had half done. He did not offer to help
him, but he delayed the remnant of his work, and waited for him to catch
up, talking all the while with gay volubility, joking this one and
that, and keeping the whole company as cheerful as it was in their dull,
sodden nature to be. He had a floating eye that harmonised with his
queer, mobile face, and played round on the different figures, but
mostly upon Lemuel's dogged, rustic industry as if it really amused him.

“What's your lay, after breakfast?” he asked, as they came to the last
log together.

“Lay?” repeated Lemuel.

“What you goin' to do?”

“I don't know; I can't tell yet.”

“You know,” said the other, “you can come back here, and get your
dinner, if you want to saw wood for it from ten till twelve, and you get
your supper if you'll saw from five to six.”

“Are you going to do that?” asked Lemuel cautiously.

“No, sir,” said the other; “I can't spare the time. I'm goin' to fill
up for all day, at breakfast, and then I'm goin' up to lay round on the
Common till it's time to go to the Police Court; and when that's over
I'm goin' back to the Common ag'in, and lay round the rest of the day. I
hain't got any leisure for no such nonsense as wood-sawin'. I don't mind
the work, but I hate to waste the time. It's the way with most o' the
pardners, unless it's the green hands. That so, pards?”

Some of them had already gone in to breakfast; the smell of the stew
came out to the wood-yard through the open door. Lemuel and his friend
finished their last stick at the same time, and went in together,
and found places side by side at the table in the waiting-room. The
attendant within its oblong was serving the men with heavy quart bowls
of the steaming broth. He brought half a loaf of light, elastic bread
with each, and there were platters of hard-tack set along the board,
which every one helped himself from freely, and broke into his broth.

“Morning, Jimmy,” said the mate, as the man brought him and Lemuel their
portions. “I hate to have the dining-room chairs off a paintin' when
there's so much style about everything else, and I've got a visitor with
me. But I tell him he'll have to take us as he finds us, and stand it
this mornin'.” He wasted no more words on his joke, but plunging his
large tin spoon into his bowl, kept his breath to cool his broth,
blowing upon it with easy grace, and swallowing it at a tremendous rate,
though Lemuel, after following his example, still found it so hot
that it brought the tears into his eyes. It was delicious, and he
was ravenous from his twenty-four hours' fast, but his companion was
scraping the bottom of his bowl before Lemuel had got half-way down, and
he finished his second as Lemuel finished his first.

“Just oncet more for both of us, Jimmy,” he said, pushing his bowl
across the board; and when the man brought them back he said, “Now, I'm
goin' to take it easy and enjoy myself. I can't never seem to get the
good of it, till about the third or fourth bowl. Too much of a hurry.”

“Do they give you four bowls?” gasped Lemuel in astonishment.

“They give you four barrels, if you can hold it,” replied the other
proudly; “and some the mates _can_, pretty near. They got an awful tank,
as a general rule, the pards has. There ain't anything mean about this
house. They don't scamp the broth, and they don't shab the measure. I
do wish you could see that refrigerator, oncet. Never been much at sea,
have you, mate?”

Lemuel said he had never been at sea at all.

The other leaned forward with his elbows on each side of his bowl, and
lazily broke his hard-tack into it. “Well, I have. I was shipped when
I was about eleven years old by a shark that got me drunk. I wanted to
ship, but I wanted to ship on an American vessel for New Orleans. First
thing I knowed I turned up on a Swedish brig bound for Venice. Ever been
to It'ly?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Well, I hain't but oncet. Oncet is enough for _me_. I run away, while
I was in Venice, and went ashore--if you can call it ashore; it's
all water, and you got to go round in boats: gondolas they call 'em
there--and went to see the American counsul, and told him I was an
American boy, and tried to get him to get me off. But he couldn't do
anything. If you ship under the Swedish flag you're a Swede, and the
whole United States couldn't get you off. If I'd 'a' shipped under the
American flag I'd 'a' been an American, I don't care if I was born in
Hottentot. That's what the counsul said. I never want to see that town
ag'in. I used to hear songs about Venice--'Beautiful Venice, Bride of
the Sea;' but I think it's a kind of a hole of a place. Well, what
I started to say was that when I turn up in Boston, now,--and I most
generally do,--I don't go to no sailor boardin'-house; I break for the
Wayfarer's Lodge, every time. It's a temperance house, and they give you
the worth o' your money.”

“Come! Hurry up!” said the attendant. He wiped the table impatiently
with his towel, and stood waiting for Lemuel and the other to finish.
All the rest had gone.

“Don't you be too fresh, pard,” said the mate, with the effect of
standing upon his rights. “Guess if you was on your third bowl, you
wouldn't hurry.”

The attendant smiled. “Don't you want to lend us a hand with the
dishes?” he asked.

“Who's sick?” asked the other in his turn.

“Johnny's got a day off.”

The boy shook his head. “No; I couldn't. If it was a case of sickness,
of course I'd do it. But I couldn't spare the time; I couldn't really.
Why, I ought to be up on the Common now.”

Lemuel had listened with a face of interest.

“Don't you want to make half a dollar, young feller?” asked the
attendant.

“Yes, I do,” said Lemuel eagerly.

“Know how to wash dishes?”

“Yes,” answered the boy, not ashamed of his knowledge, as the boy of
another civilisation might have been. Nothing more distinctly marks
the rustic New England civilisation than the taming of its men to the
performance of certain domestic offices elsewhere held dishonourably
womanish. The boy learns not only to milk and to keep the milk cans
clean, but to churn, to wash dishes, and to cook.

“Come around here, then,” said the attendant, and Lemuel promptly
obeyed.

“Well, now,” said his mate, “that's right. I'd do it myself, if I had
the time.” He pulled his soft wool hat out of his hip pocket. “Well,
good morning, pards. I don't know as I shall see you again much before
night.” Lemuel was lifting a large tray, heavy with empty broth-bowls.
“What _time_ did you say it was, Jimmy?”

“Seven o'clock.”

“Well, I just got time to get there,” said the other, putting on his
hat, and pushing out of the door.

At the moment Lemuel was lifting his tray of empty broth-bowls, Mr.
Sewell was waking for the early quarter-to-eight breakfast, which he
thought it right to make--not perhaps as an example to his parishioners,
most of whom had the leisure to lie later, but as a sacrifice, not too
definite, to the lingering ideal of suffering. He could not work before
breakfast--his delicate digestion forbade that--or he would have risen
still earlier, and he employed the twenty minutes he had between his
bath and his breakfast in skimming the morning paper.

Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: the
_Advertiser_ which he had always taken, and a cheap little one-cent
paper, which had just been started, and which he had subscribed for
experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to encourage the
young men who had established it. He did not like it very well. It was
made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt with local matters
in a manner that was at once a little more lively and a little more
intimate than he had been used to. But before he had quite made up his
mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it on that very account. She
said it was interesting. On this point she used her conscience a little
less actively than usual, and he had to make her observe that to be
interesting was not the whole duty of journalism. It had become a matter
of personal pride with them respectively to attack and defend _The
Sunrise_, as I shall call the little sheet, though that was not the
name; and Mr. Sewell had lately made some gain through the character
of the police reports, which _The Sunrise_ had been developing into a
feature. It was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst
cases were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of
flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for their
perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected to the
court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the procedure
Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for the worthy
gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided on probation. He
now read that department of _The Sunrise_ the first thing every
morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put Mrs. Sewell
hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in the foreign news
of the _Advertiser_ caught his eye, and he laid _The Sunrise_ aside to
read at the breakfast-table. His wife came down in a cotton dress, as
a tribute to the continued warmth of the weather, and said that she had
not called the children, because it was Saturday, and they might as well
have their sleep out. He liked to see her in that dress; it had a
leafy rustling that was pleasant to his ear, and as she looked into the
library he gaily put out his hand, which she took, and suffered
herself to be drawn toward him. Then she gave him a kiss, somewhat less
business-like and preoccupied than usual.

“Well, you've got Lemuel Barker off your mind at last,” she divined, in
recognition of her husband's cheerfulness.

“Yes, he's off,” admitted Sewell.

“I hope he'll stay in Willoughby Pastures after this. Of course it
puts an end to our going there next summer.” “Oh, I don't know,” Sewell
feebly demurred.

“_I_ do,” said his wife, but not despising his insincerity enough to
insist that he did also. The mellow note of an apostle's bell--the
gift of an aesthetic parishioner--came from below, and she said, “Well,
there's breakfast, David,” and went before him down the stairs.

He brought his papers with him. It would have been her idea of
heightened cosiness, at this breakfast, which they had once a week
alone together, not to have the newspapers, but she saw that he felt
differently, and after a number of years of married life a woman learns
to let her husband have his own way in some unimportant matters. It was
so much his nature to have some sort of reading always in hand, that
he was certainly more himself, and perhaps more companionable with his
papers than without them.

She merely said, “Let me take the _Sunrise_,” when she had poured out
his coffee, and he had helped her to cantaloupe and steak, and spread
his _Advertiser_ beside his plate. He had the _Sunrise_ in his lap.

“No, you may have the _Advertiser_” he said, handing it over the table
to her. “I was down first, and I got both the papers. I'm not really
obliged to make any division, but I've seen the _Advertiser_, and I'm
willing to behave unselfishly. If you're very impatient for the police
report in the _Sunrise_ I'll read it aloud for you. I think that will be
a very good test of its quality, don't you?”

He opened the little sheet, and smiled teasingly at his wife, who said,
“Yes, read it aloud; I'm not at all ashamed of it.”

She put the _Advertiser_ in her lap, and leaned defiantly forward,
while she stirred her coffee, and Sewell unfolded the little sheet, and
glanced up and down its columns. “Go on! If you can't find it, I can.”

“Never mind! Here it is,” said Sewell, and he began to read--

“'The mill opened yesterday morning with a smaller number of grists than
usual, but they made up in quality what they lacked in quantity.'

“Our friend's metaphor seems to have weakened under him a little,”
 commented Sewell, and then he pursued--

“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched--'

“Come, now, Lucy! You'll admit that this is horrible?” he broke off.

“No,” said his wife, “I will admit nothing of the kind. It's flippant,
I'll allow. Go on!”

“I can't,” said Sewell; but he obeyed.

“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched, and an habitual drunk,
in the person of a burly dame from Tipperary, who pleaded not guilty and
then urged the “poor childer” in extenuation, was sent down the harbour
for three months; Uncle Cook had been put in charge of a couple of young
frailties whose hind name was woman--'

“How do you like that, my dear?” asked Sewell exultantly.

Mrs. Sewell looked grave, and then burst into a shocked laugh. “You must
stop that paper, David! I can't have it about for the children to get
hold of. But it _is_ funny, isn't it? That will do--”

“No, I think you'd better have it all, now. There can't be anything
worse. It's funny, yes, with that truly infernal drollery which the
newspaper wits seem to have the art of.” He read on--“--'when a case was
called that brought the breath of clover blossoms and hay-seed into the
sultry court-room, and warmed the cockles of the habitués' toughened
pericardiums with a touch of real poetry. This was a case of assault,
with intent to rob, in which a lithe young blonde, answering to the
good old Puritanic name of Statira Dudley, was the complainant, and the
defendant an innocent-looking, bucolic youth, yclept--'”

Sewell stopped and put his hand to his forehead.

“What is it, David?” demanded his wife. “Why don't you go on? Is it too
scandalous?”

“No, no,” murmured the minister.

“Well?”

“I can't go on. But you must read it, Lucy,” he said, in quite a passion
of humility. “And you must try to be merciful. That poor boy--that--”

He handed the paper to his wife, and made no attempt to escape from
judgment, but sat submissive while she read the report of Lemuel's
trial. The story was told throughout in the poetico-jocular spirit of
the opening sentences; the reporter had felt the simple charm of the
affair, only to be ashamed of it and the more offensive about it.

When she had finished Mrs. Sewell did not say anything. She merely
looked at her husband, who looked really sick.

At last he said, making an effort to rise from his chair, “I must go and
see him, I suppose.”

“Yes, if you can find him,” responded his wife, with a sigh.

“Find him?” echoed Sewell.

“Yes. Goodness knows what more trouble the wretched creature's got into
by this time. You saw that he was acquitted, didn't you?” she demanded,
in answer to her husband's stare.

“No, I didn't. I supposed he was convicted, of course.”

“Well, you see it isn't so bad as it might be,” she said, using a pity
which she did not perhaps altogether feel. “Eat your breakfast now,
David, and then go and try to look him up.”

“Oh, I don't want any breakfast,” pleaded the minister.

He offered to rise again, but she motioned him down in his chair.
“David, you shall! I'm not going to have you going about all day with a
headache. Eat! And then when you've finished your breakfast, go and find
out which station that officer Baker belongs to, and he can tell you
something about the boy, if any one can.”

Sewell made what shift he could to grasp these practical ideas, and
he obediently ate of whatever his wife bade him. She would not let him
hurry his breakfast in the least, and when he had at last finished, she
said, “Now you can go, David. And when you've found the boy, don't you
let him out of your sight again till you've put him aboard the train for
Willoughby Pastures, and seen the train start out of the depot with him.
Never mind your sermon. I will be setting down the heads of a sermon,
while you're gone, that will do _you_ good, if you write it out, whether
it helps any one else or not.”

Sewell was not so sure of that. He had no doubt that his wife would
set down the heads of a powerful sermon, but he questioned whether any
discourse, however potent, would have force to benefit such an abandoned
criminal as he felt himself, in walking down his brown-stone steps,
and up the long brick sidewalk of Bolingbroke Street toward the Public
Garden. The beds of geraniums and the clumps of scarlet-blossomed salvia
in the little grass-plots before the houses, which commonly flattered
his eye with their colour, had a suggestion of penal fires in them now,
that needed no lingering superstition in his nerves to realise something
very like perdition for his troubled soul. It was not wickedness he had
been guilty of, but he had allowed a good man to be made the agency
of suffering, and he was sorely to blame, for he had sinned against
himself. This was what his conscience said, and though his reason
protested against his state of mind as a phase of the religious insanity
which we have all inherited in some measure from Puritan times, it
could not help him. He went along involuntarily framing a vow that if
Providence would mercifully permit him to repair the wrong he had done,
he would not stop at any sacrifice to get that unhappy boy back to his
home, but would gladly take any open shame or obloquy upon himself in
order to accomplish this.

He met a policeman on the bridge of the Public Garden, and made bold to
ask him at once if he knew an officer named Baker, and which station he
could be found at. The policeman was over-rich in the acquaintance
of two officers of the name of Baker, and he put his hand on Sewell's
shoulder, in the paternal manner of policemen when they will be
friendly, and advised him to go first to the Neponset Street station,
to which one of these Bakers was attached, and inquire there first.
“Anyway, that's what I should do in your place.”

Sewell was fulsomely grateful, as we all are in the like case, and at
the station he used an urbanity with the captain which was perhaps not
thrown away upon him, but which was certainly disproportioned to the
trouble he was asking him to take in saying whether he knew where he
could find officer Baker.

“Yes, I do,” said the captain. “You can find him in bed, upstairs,
but I'd rather you wouldn't wake a man off duty, if you don't have to,
especially if you don't know he's the one. What's wanted?”

Sewell stopped to say that the captain was quite right, and then he
explained why he wished to see officer Baker.

The captain listened with nods of his head at the names and facts given.
“Guess you won't have to get Baker up for that. I can tell you what
there is to tell. I don't know where your young man is now, but I gave
him an order for a bed at the Wayfarer's Lodge last night, and I guess
he slept there. You a friend of his?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, much questioning inwardly whether he could be truly
described as such. “I wish to befriend him,” he added savingly. “I knew
him at home, and I am sure of his innocence.”

“Oh, I guess he's _innocent_ enough,” said the captain. “Well, now,
I tell you what you do, if you want to befriend him; you get him home
quick as you can.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, helpless to resent the officer's authoritative and
patronising tone. “That's what I wish to do. Do you suppose he's at the
Wayfarer's Lodge now?” asked Sewell.

“Can't say,” said the captain, tilting himself back in his chair, and
putting his quill toothpick between his lips like a cigarette. “The only
way is to go and see.”

“Thank you very much,” said the minister, accepting his dismissal
meekly, as a man vowed to ignominy should, but feeling keenly that he
was dismissed, and dismissed in disgrace.

At the Lodge he was received less curtly. The manager was there with
a long morning's leisure before him, and disposed to friendliness that
Sewell found absurdly soothing. He turned over the orders for beds
delivered by the vagrants the night before, and “Yes,” he said, coming
to Lemuel's name, “he slept here; but nobody knows where he is by this
time. Wait a bit, sir!” he added to Sewell's fallen countenance. “There
was one of the young fellows stayed to help us through with the dishes,
this morning. I'll have him up; or may be you'd like to go down and take
a look at our kitchen? You'll find him there if it's the one. Here's our
card, We can supply you with all sorts of firewood at less cost than the
dealers, and you'll be helping the poor fellows to earn an honest bed
and breakfast. This way, sir!”

Sewell promised to buy his wood there, put the card respectfully
into his pocket, and followed the manager downstairs, and through the
basement to the kitchen. He arrived just as Lemuel was about to lift a
trayful of clean soup-bowls, to carry it upstairs. After a glance at the
minister, he stood still with dropped eyes.

Sewell did not know in what form to greet the boy on whom he had
unwillingly brought so much evil, and he found the greater difficulty in
deciding as he saw Lemuel's face hardening against him.

“Barker!” he said at last. “I'm very glad to find you--I have been very
anxious to find you.”

Lemuel made no sign of sympathy, but stood still in his long check
apron, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, and the minister
was obliged to humble himself still further to this figure of lowly
obstinacy.

“I should like to speak with you. Can I speak with you a few moments?”

The manager politely stepped into the storeroom, and affected to employ
himself there, leaving Lemuel and the minister alone together.




X.


Sewell lost no time. “I want you to go home, Barker. I feel that I am
wholly to blame, and greatly to blame, for your coming to Boston with
the expectation that brought you; and that I am indirectly responsible
for all the trouble that has befallen you since you came. I want to be
the means of your getting home, in any way you can let me.”

This was a very different way of talking from the smooth superiority of
address which the minister had used with him the other day at his own
house. Lemuel was not insensible to the atonement offered him, and it
was not from sulky stubbornness that he continued silent, and left the
minister to explore the causes of his reticence unaided.

“I will go home _with_ you, if you like,” pursued the minister, though
his mind misgave him that this was an extreme which Mrs. Sewell would
not have justified him in. “I will go with you, and explain all
the circumstances to your friends, in case there should be any
misunderstanding--though in that event I should have to ask you to be my
guest till Monday.” Here the unhappy man laid hold of the sheep, which
could not bring him greater condemnation than the lamb.

“I guess they won't know anything about it,” said Lemuel, with whatever
intention.

It seemed hardened indifference to the minister, and he felt it his
disagreeable duty to say, “I am afraid they will. I read of it in the
newspaper this morning, and I'm afraid that an exaggerated report of
your misfortunes will reach Willoughby Pastures, and alarm your family.”

A faint pallor came over the boy's face, and he stood again in his
impenetrable, rustic silence. The voice that finally spoke from, it
said, “I guess I don't want to go home, then.”

“You _must_ go home!” said the minister, with more of imploring than
imperiousness in his command. “What will they make of your prolonged
absence?”

“I sent a postal to mother this morning. They lent me one.”

“But what will you do here, without work and without means? I wish you
to go home with me--I feel responsible for you--and remain with me till
you can hear from your mother. I'm sorry you came to Boston--it's no
place for you, as you must know by this time, and I am sure your mother
will agree with me in desiring your return.”

“I guess I don't want to go home,” said Lemuel.

“Are you afraid that an uncharitable construction will be placed upon
what has happened to you by your neighbours?” Lemuel did not answer. “I
assure you that all that can be arranged. I will write to your pastor,
and explain it fully. But in any event,” continued Sewell, “it is your
duty to yourself and your friends to go home and live it down. It would
be your duty to do so, even if you had been guilty of wrong, instead of
the victim of misfortune.”

“I don't know,” said Lemuel, “as I want to go home and be the
laughing-stock.”

Against this point Sewell felt himself helpless. He could not pretend
that the boy would not be ridiculous in the eyes of his friends, and all
the more ridiculous because so wholly innocent. He could only say, “That
is a thing you must bear,” and then it occurred to him to ask, “Do you
feel that it is right to let your family meet the ridicule alone?”

“I guess nobody will speak to mother about it, more than once,” said
Lemuel, with a just pride in his mother's powers of retort. A woman who,
unaided and alone, had worn the Bloomer costume for twenty years in
the heart of a commentative community like Willoughby Pastures, was not
likely to be without a cutting tongue for her defence.

“But your sister,” urged Sewell; “your brother-in-law,” he feebly added.

“I guess they will have to stand it,” replied Lemuel.

The minister heaved a sigh of hopeless perplexity. “What do you propose
to do, then? You can't remain here without means. Do you expect to
sell your poetry?” he asked, goaded to the question by a conscience
peculiarly sore on that point.

It made Lemuel blush. “No, I don't expect to sell it, now. They took it
out of my pocket on the Common.”

“I am glad of that,” said the minister as simply, “and I feel bound to
warn you solemnly, that there is absolutely _no_ hope for you in that
direction.”

Lemuel said nothing.

The minister stood baffled again. After a bad moment he asked, “Have you
anything particular in view?”

“I don't know as I have.”

“How long can you remain here?”

“I don't know exactly.”

Sewell turned and followed the manager into the refrigerator room, where
he had remained patiently whistling throughout this interview.

When he came back, Lemuel had carried one trayful of bowls upstairs,
and returned for another load, which he was piling carefully up for safe
transportation.

“The manager tells me,” said Sewell, “that practically you can stay here
as long as you like, if you work, but he doesn't think it desirable you
should remain, nor do I. But I wish to find you here again, when I come
back. I have something in view for you.”

This seemed to be a question, and Lemuel said, “All right,” and went
on piling up his bowls. He added, “I shouldn't want you to take a great
deal of trouble.”

“Oh, it's no trouble,” groaned the minister. “Then I may depend upon
seeing you here any time during the day?”

“I don't know as I'm going away,” Lemuel admitted.

“Well, then, good-bye, for the present,” said Sewell, and after speaking
again to the manager, and gratefully ordering some kindling which he
did not presently need, he went out, and took his way homeward. But he
stopped half a block short of his own door, and rang at Miss Vane's.
To his perturbed and eager spirit, it seemed nothing short of a divine
mercy that she should be at home. If he had not been a man bent on
repairing his wrong at any cost to others, he would hardly have taken
the step he now contemplated without first advising with his wife, who,
he felt sure, would have advised against it. His face did not brighten
at all when Miss Vane came briskly in, with the “_How_ d'ye do?” which
he commonly found so cheering. She pulled up the blind and saw his
knotted brow.

“What is the matter? You look as if you had got Lemuel Barker back on
your hands.”

“I have,” said the minister briefly.

Miss Vane gave a wild laugh of delight. “You _don't_ mean it!” she
sputtered, sitting down before him, and peering into his face. “What
_do_ you mean?”

Sewell was obliged to possess Miss Vane's entire ignorance of all the
facts in detail. From point to point he paused; he began really to be
afraid she would do herself an injury with her laughing.

She put her hand on his arm and bowed her head forward, with her face
buried in her handkerchief. “What--what--do you suppose-pose--they did
with the po-po-_po_em they stole from him?”

“Well, one thing I'm sure they _didn't_ do,” said Sewell bitterly. “They
didn't _read_ it.”

Miss Vane hid her face in her handkerchief, and then plucked it away,
and shrieked again. She stopped, with the sudden calm that succeeds such
a paroxysm, and, “Does Mrs. Sewell know all about this?” she panted.

“She knows everything, except my finding him in the dish-washing
department of the Wayfarer's Lodge,” said Sewell gloomily, “and my
coming to you.”

“Why do you come to me?” asked Miss Vane, her face twitching and her
eyes brimming.

“Because,” answered Sewell, “I'd rather not go to her till I have done
something.”

Miss Vane gave way again, and Sewell sat regarding her ruefully.

“What do you expect me to do?” She looked at him over her handkerchief,
which she kept pressed against her mouth.

“I haven't the least idea what I expected you to do. I expected you to
tell me. You have an inventive mind.”

Miss Vane shook her head. Her eyes grew serious, and after a moment she
said, “I'm afraid I'm not equal to Lemuel Barker. Besides,” she added,
with a tinge of trouble, “I have _my_ problem, already.”

“Yes,” said the minister sympathetically. “How has the flower charity
turned out?”

“She went yesterday with one of the ladies, and carried flowers to the
city hospital. But she wasn't at all satisfied with the result. She said
the patients were mostly disgusting old men that hadn't been shaved. I
think that now she wants to try her flowers on criminals. She says she
wishes to visit the prisons.”

Sewell brightened forlornly. “Why not let her reform Barker?”

This sent Miss Vane off again. “Poor boy!” she sighed, when she had come
to herself. “No, there's nothing that I can do for him, except to order
some firewood from his benefactors.”

“I did that,” said Sewell. “But I don't see how it's to help Barker
exactly.”

“I would gladly join in a public subscription to send him home. But you
say he won't _go_ home?”

“He won't go home,” sighed the minister. “He's determined to stay. I
suspect he would accept employment, if it were offered him in the right
spirit.”

Miss Vane shook her head. “There's nothing I can think of except
shovelling snow. And as yet it's rather warm October weather.”

“There's certainly no snow to shovel,” admitted Sewell. He rose
disconsolately. “Well, there's nothing for it, I suppose, but to put
him down at the Christian Union, and explain his checkered career to
everybody who proposes to employ him.”

Miss Vane could not keep the laughter out of her eyes; she nervously
tapped her lips with her handkerchief, to keep it from them. Suddenly
she halted Sewell, in his dejected progress toward the door. “I might
give him my furnace?”

“Furnace?” echoed Sewell.

“Yes. Jackson has 'struck' for twelve dollars a month, and at present
there is a 'lock-out,'--I believe that's what it's called. And I had
determined not to yield as long as the fine weather lasted. I knew I
should give in at the first frost. I will take Barker now, if you think
he can manage the furnace.”

“I've no doubt he can. Has Jackson really struck?” Miss Vane nodded. “He
hasn't said anything to me about it.”

“He probably intends to make special terms to the clergy. But he told me
he was putting up the rates on all his 'famblies' this winter.”

“If he puts them up on me, I will take Barker too,” said the minister
boldly. “If he will come,” he added, with less courage. “Well, I will
go round to the Lodge, and see what he thinks of it. Of course, he
can't live upon ten dollars a month, and I must look him up something
besides.”

“That's the only thing I can think of at present,” said Miss Vane.

“Oh, you're indefinitely good to think of so much,” said Sewell. “You
must excuse me if my reception of your kindness has been qualified by
the reticence with which Barker received mine, this morning.”

“Oh, do tell me about it!” cried Miss Vane.

“Sometime I will. But I can assure you it was such as to make me shrink
from another interview. I don't know but Barker may fling your proffered
furnace in my teeth. But I'm sure we both mean well. And I thank you,
all the same. Good-bye.”

“Poor Mr. Sewell!” said Miss Vane, following him to the door. “May I run
down and tell Mrs. Sewell?”

“Not yet,” said the minister sadly. He was too insecure of Barker's
reception to be able to enjoy the joke.

When he got back to the Wayfarer's Lodge, whither he made himself walk
in penance, he found Lemuel with a book in his hand, reading, while the
cook stirred about the kitchen, and the broth, which he had well under
way for the mid-day meal, lifted the lid of its boiler from time to time
and sent out a joyous whiff of steam. The place had really a cosiness
of its own, and Sewell began to fear that his victim had been so far
corrupted by its comfort as to be unwilling to leave the Refuge. He had
often seen the subtly disastrous effect of bounty, and it was one of the
things he trembled for in considering the question of public aid to the
poor. Before he addressed Barker, he saw him entered upon the dire life
of idleness and dependence, partial or entire, which he had known so
many Americans even willing to lead since the first great hard times
began; and he spoke to him with the asperity of anticipative censure.

“Barker!” he said, and Lemuel lifted his head from the book he was
reading. “I have found something for you to do. I still prefer you
should go home, and I advise you to do so. But,” he added, at the look
that came into Lemuel's face, “if you are determined to stay, this is
the best I can do for you. It isn't a full support, but it's something,
and you must look about for yourself, and not rest till you've found
full work, and something better fitted for you. Do you think you can
take care of a furnace?”

“Hot air?” asked Lemuel.

“Yes.”

“I guess so. I took care of the church furnace, last winter.”

“I didn't know you had one,” said the minister, brightening in the ray
of hope. “Would you be willing to take care of a domestic furnace--a
furnace in a private house?”

Lemuel pondered the proposal in silence. Whatever objections there were
to it in its difference from the aims of his ambition in coming to the
city of Boston, he kept to himself; and his ignorance of city prejudices
and sophistications probably suggested nothing against the honest work
to his pride. “I guess I should,” he said at last. “Well, then, come
with me.”

Sewell judged it best not to tell him whose furnace he was to take care
of; he had an impression that Miss Vane was included in the resentment
which Lemuel seemed to cherish toward him. But when he had him at
her door, “It's the lady whom you saw at my house the other day,” he
explained. It was then too late for Lemuel to rebel if he had wished,
and they went in.

If there was any such unkindness in Lemuel's breast toward her, it
yielded promptly to her tact. She treated him at once, not like a
servant, but like a young person, and yet she used a sort of respect for
his independence which was soothing to his rustic pride. She put it
on the money basis at once; she told him that she should give him ten
dollars a month for taking care of the furnace, keeping the sidewalk
clear of snow, shovelling the paths in the backyard for the women to
get at their clothes-lines, carrying up and down coal and ashes for the
grates, and doing errands. She said that this was what she had always
paid, and asked him if he understood and were satisfied.

Lemuel answered with one yes to both her questions, and then Miss Vane
said that of course till the weather changed they should want no fire in
the furnace, but that it might change, any day, and they should begin
at once and count October as a full month. She thought he had better go
down and look at the furnace and see if it was in order; she had had the
pipes cleaned, but perhaps it needed blacking; the cook would show him
how it worked. She went with him to the head of the basement stairs, and
calling down, “Jane, here is Lemuel, come to look after the furnace,”
 left him and Jane to complete the acquaintance upon coming in sight of
each other, and went back to the minister. He had risen to go, and she
gave him her hand, while a smile rippled into laughter on her lips.

“Do you think,” she asked, struggling with her mirth to keep unheard of
those below, “that it is quite the work for a literary man?”

“If he is a man,” said Sewell courageously, “the work won't keep him
from being literary.”

Miss Vane laughed at his sudden recovery of spirit, as she had laughed
at his dejection; but he did not care. He hurried home, with a sermon
kindling in his mind so obviously, that his wife did not detain him
beyond a few vital questions, and let him escape from having foisted his
burden upon Miss Vane with the simple comment, “Well, we shall see how
that will work.”

As once before, Sewell tacitly took a hint from his own experience, and
enlarging to more serious facts from it, preached effort in the erring.
He denounced mere remorse. Better not feel that at all, he taught;
and he declared that what is ordinarily distinguished from remorse
as repentance, was equally a mere corrosion of the spirit unless some
attempt at reparation went with it. He maintained that though some
mischiefs--perhaps most mischiefs--were irreparable so far as restoring
the original status was concerned, yet every mischief was reparable in
the good-will and the good deed of its perpetrator. Do what you could
to retrieve yourself from error, and then, not leave the rest to
Providence, but keep doing. The good, however small, must grow if tended
and nurtured like a useful plant, as the evil would certainly grow,
like a wild and poisonous weed, if left to itself. Sin, he said, was a
terrible mystery; one scarcely knew how to deal with it or to attempt
to determine its nature; but perhaps--he threw out the thought while
warning those who heard him of its danger in some aspects--sin was not
wholly an evil. We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition
to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to
another,--the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept
them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another,
and knew not how to mitigate--possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this
wrong, was good in disguise. But, returning to his original point, we
were to beware how we rested in this despair. In the very extremity
of our anguish, our fear, our shame, we were to gird ourselves up to
reparation. Strive to do good, he preached; strive most of all to do
good to those you have done harm to. His text was “Cease to do evil.”

He finished his sermon during the afternoon, and in the evening his wife
said they would run up to Miss Vane's. Sewell shrank from this a little,
with the obscure dread that Lemuel might have turned his back upon good
fortune, and abandoned the place offered him, in which case Sewell would
have to give a wholly different turn to his sermon; but he consented, as
indeed he must. He was as curious as his wife to know how the experiment
had resulted.

Miss Vane did not wait to let them ask. “My dear,” she said, kissing
Mrs. Sewell and giving her hand to the minister in one, “he is a pearl!
And I've kept him from mixing his native lustre with Rising Sun Stove
Polish by becoming his creditor in the price of a pair of overalls. I
had no idea they were so cheap, and you can see that they will fade,
with a few washings, to a perfect Millet blue. They were quite his own
idea, when he found the furnace needed blacking, and he wanted to
use the fifty cents he earned this morning toward the purchase, but
I insisted upon advancing the entire dollar myself. Neatness,
self-respect, awe-inspiring deference!--he is each and every one of them
in person.”

Sewell could not forbear a glance of triumph at his wife.

“You leave us very little to ask,” said that injured woman.

“But I've left myself a great deal to tell, my dear,” retorted Miss
Vane, “and I propose to keep the floor; though I don't really know where
to begin.”

“I thought you had got past the necessity of beginning,” said Sewell.
“We know that the new pearl sweeps clean,”--Miss Vane applauded his
mixed metaphor--“and now you might go on from that point.”

“Well, you may think I'm rash,” said Miss Vane, “but I've thoroughly
made up my mind to keep him.”

“Dear, _dear_ Miss Vane!” cried the minister. “Mrs. Sewell thinks you're
rash, but I don't. What do you mean by keeping him?”

“Keeping him as a fixture--a permanency--a continuosity.”

“Oh! A continuosity? I know what that is in the ordinary acceptation of
the term, but I'm not sure that I follow your meaning exactly.”

“Why, it's simply this,” said Miss Vane. “I have long secretly wanted
the protection of what Jane calls a man-body in the House, and when I
saw how Lemuel had blacked the furnace, I knew I should feel as safe
with him as with a whole body of troops.”

“Well,” sighed the minister, “you have not been rash, perhaps, but
you'll allow that you've been rapid.”

“No,” said Miss Vane, “I won't allow that. I have simply been
intuitive--nothing more. His functions are not decided yet, but it is
decided that he is to stay; he's to sleep in the little room over the L,
and in my tranquillised consciousness he's been there years already.”

“And has Sibyl undertaken Barker's reformation?” asked Sewell.

“Don't interrupt! Don't anticipate! I admit nothing till I come to it.
But after I had arranged with Lemuel I began to think of Sibyl.”

“That was like some ladies I have known of,” said Sewell. “You
women commit yourselves to a scheme, in order to show your skill in
reconciling circumstances to the irretrievable. Well?”

“_Don't_ interrupt, David!” cried his wife.

“Oh, let him go on,” said Miss Vane. “It's all very well, taking
people into your house on the spur of the moment, and in obedience to
a generous impulse, but when you reflect that the object of your good
intentions slept in the Wayfarer's Lodge the night before, and in the
police-station the night before that, and enjoys a newspaper celebrity
in connection with a case of assault and battery with intent to
rob,--why, then you _do_ reflect!”

“Yes,” said Sewell, “that is just the point where I should begin.”

“I thought,” continued Miss Vane, “I had better tell Sibyl all about it,
so if by any chance the neighbours' kitchens should have heard of the
case--they read the police reports very carefully in the kitchens----”

“They do in some drawing-rooms,” interrupted Sewell.

“It's well for you they do, David,” said his wife. “Your _protégé_ would
have been in your Refuge still, if they didn't.”

“I see!” cried the minister. “I shall have to take the _Sunrise_ another
week.”

Miss Vane looked from one to the other in sympathetic ignorance, but
they did not explain, and she went on.

“And if they should hear Lemuel's name, and put two and two together,
and the talk should get to Sibyl--well, I thought it all over, until the
whole thing became perfectly lurid, and I wished Lemuel Barker was back
in the depths of Willoughby Pastures----”

“I understand,” said Sewell. “Go on!”

Miss Vane did so, after stopping to laugh. “It seemed to me I couldn't
wait for Sibyl to get home--she spent the night in Brookline, and didn't
come till five o'clock--to tell her. I began before she had got her
hat or gloves off, and she sat down with them on, and listened like a
three-years' child to the Ancient Mariner, but she lost no time when
she understood the facts. She went out immediately and stripped the
nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it when you came in, there's
hardly a blossom left. She took the decorations of Lemuel's room into
her own hands at once; and if there is any saving power in nasturtiums,
he will be a changed person. She says that now the great object is
to keep him from feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be
reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him. I don't know how she
knows.”

“Barker might feel that he was disgraced,” said the minister, “but I
don't believe that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect that
he needed to be reclaimed.”

“He makes me suspect that _I_ need to be reclaimed,” said Miss Vane,
“when he looks at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.”

Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations yet?”

“Not at all. They are to steal upon him when he comes in to-night. The
gas is to be turned very low, and he is to notice everything gradually,
so as not to get the impression that things have been done with a design
upon him.” She laughed in reporting these ideas, which were plainly
those of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered at the end.

A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted in upon their group
like an apparition. She had heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue
eyes under them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour.

“Aunty!” she said severely, “have you been telling?”

“Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said Miss Vane. “_Their_ knowing
won't hurt. He'll never know it.”

“If he hears you laughing, he'll know it's about him. He's in the
kitchen, now. He's come in the back way. Do be quiet.” She had given her
hand without other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the Sewells
in turn, and now she passed out of the room.




XI.


“What makes Lemuel such a gift,” said Miss Vane, in a talk which she had
with Sewell a month later, “is that he is so supplementary.”

“Do you mean just in the supplementary sense of the term?”

“Well, not in the fifth-wheel sense. I mean that he supplements us, all
and singular--if you will excuse the legal exactness.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Sewell; “I should like even more exactness.”

“Yes; but before I particularise I must express my general satisfaction
in him as a man-body. I had no idea that man bodies in a house were so
perfectly admirable.”

“I've sometimes feared that we were not fully appreciated,” said Sewell.
“Well?”

“The house is another thing with a man-body in it. I've often gone
without little things I wanted, simply because I hated to make Sarah
bring them, and because I hated still worse to go after them, knowing
we were both weakly and tired. Now I deny myself nothing. I make Lemuel
fetch and carry without remorse, from morning till night. I never knew
it before, but the man-body seems never to be tired, or ill, or sleepy.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, “that is often the idea of the woman-body. I'm not
sure that it's correct.”

“Oh, _don't_ attack it!” implored Miss Vane. “You don't _know_ what a
blessing it is. Then, the man-body never complains, and I can't see that
he expects anything more in an order than the clear understanding of it.
He doesn't expect it to be accounted for in any way; the fact that
you say you want a thing is enough. It is very strange. Then the moral
support of the presence of a man-body is enormous. I now know that I
have never slept soundly since I have kept house alone--that I have
never passed a night without hearing burglars or smelling fire.”

“And now?”

“And now I shouldn't mind a legion of burglars in the house; I shouldn't
mind being burned in my bed every night. I feel that Lemuel is in
charge, and that nothing can happen.”

“Is he really so satisfactory?” asked Sewell, exhaling a deep relief.

“He is, indeed,” said Miss Vane. “I couldn't, exaggerate it.”

“Well, well! Don't try. We are finite, after all, you know. Do you think
it can last?”

“I have thought of that,” answered Miss Vane. “I don't see why it
shouldn't last. I have tried to believe that I did a foolish thing in
coming to your rescue, but I can't see that I did. I don't see why
it shouldn't last as long as Lemuel chooses. And he seems perfectly
contented with his lot. He doesn't seem to regard it as domestic
service, but as domestication, and he patronises our inefficiency while
he spares it. His common-sense is extraordinary--it's exemplary; it
almost makes one wish to have common-sense one's-self.” They had now got
pretty far from the original proposition, and Sewell returned to it with
the question, “Well, and how does he supplement you singularly?”

“Oh! oh, yes!” said Miss Vane. “I could hardly tell you without going
into too deep a study of character.”

“I'm rather fond of that,” suggested the minister.

“Yes, and I've no doubt we should all work very nicely into a sermon as
illustrations; but I can't more than indicate the different cases. In
the first place, Jane's forgetfulness seems to be growing upon her, and
since Lemuel came she's abandoned herself to ecstasies of oblivion.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. She's quite given over remembering _any_thing, because she knows
that he will remember _every_thing.”

“I see. And you?”

“Well, you have sometimes thought I was a little rash.”

“A little? Did I think it was a little?”

“Well, a good deal. But it was all nothing to what I've been since
Lemuel came. I used to keep some slight check upon myself for Sibyl's
sake; but I don't now. I know that Lemuel is there to temper, to delay,
to modify the effect of every impulse, and so I am all impulse now. And
I've quite ceased to rule my temper. I know that Lemuel has self-control
enough for all the tempers in the house, and so I feel perfectly calm in
my wildest transports of fury.”

“I understand,” said Sewell. “And does Sibyl permit herself a similar
excess in her fancies and ambitions?”

“Quite,” said Miss Vane. “I don't know that she consciously relies
upon Lemuel to supplement her, any more than Jane does; but she must be
unconsciously aware that no extravagance of hers can be dangerous while
Lemuel is in the house.”

“Unconsciously aware is good. She hasn't got tired of reforming him
yet?”

“I don't know. I sometimes think she wishes he had gone a little farther
in crime. Then his reformation would be more obvious.”

“Yes; I can appreciate that. Does she still look after his art and
literature?”

“That phase has changed a little. She thinks now that he ought to be
stimulated, if anything--that he ought to read George Eliot. She's put
_Middlemarch_ and _Romola_ on his shelf. She says that he looks like
Tito Malemma.”

Sewell rose. “Well, I don't see but what your supplement is a very
demoralising element. I shall never dare to tell Mrs. Sewell what you've
said.”

“Oh, she knows it,” cried Miss Vane. “We've agreed that you will
counteract any temptation that Lemuel may feel to abuse his advantages
by the ferociously self-denying sermons you preach at him every Sunday.”

“Do I preach at him? Do you notice it?” asked Sewell nervously.

“Notice it?” laughed Miss Vane. “I should think your whole congregation
would notice it. You seem to look at nobody else.”

“I know it! Since he began to come, I can't keep my eyes off him. I do
deliver my sermons at him. I believe I write them at him! He has an eye
of terrible and exacting truth. I feel myself on trial before him. He
holds me up to a standard of sincerity that is killing me. Mrs. Sewell
was bad enough; I was reasonably bad myself; but this! Couldn't you keep
him away? Do you think it's exactly decorous to let your man-servant
occupy a seat in your family pew? How do you suppose it looks to the
Supreme Being?”

Miss Vane was convulsed. “I had precisely those misgivings! But Lemuel
hadn't. He asked me what the number of our pew was, and I hadn't the
heart--or else I hadn't the face--to tell him he mustn't sit in it. How
could I? Do you think it's so very scandalous?”

“I don't know,” said Sewell. “It may lead to great abuses. If we tacitly
confess ourselves equal in the sight of God, how much better are we than
the Roman Catholics?”

Miss Vane could not suffer these ironies to go on.

“He approves of your preaching. He has talked your sermons over with me.
You oughtn't to complain.”

“Oh, I don't! Do you think he's really softening a little toward me?”

“Not personally, that I know,” said Miss Vane. “But he seems to regard
you as a channel of the truth.”

“I ought to be glad of so much,” said Sewell. “I confess that I hadn't
supposed he was at all of our way of thinking. They preached a very
appreciable orthodoxy at Willoughby Pastures.”

“I don't know about that,” said Miss Vane. “I only know that he approves
your theology, or your ethics.”

“Ethics, I hope. I'm sure _they're_ right.” After a thoughtful moment
the minister asked, “Have you observed that they have softened him
socially at all--broken up that terrible rigidity of attitude, that
dismaying retentiveness of speech?”

“I know what you mean!” cried Miss Vane delightedly. “I believe Lemuel
_is_ a little more supple, a little _less_ like a granite boulder in one
of his meadows. But I can't say that he's glib yet. He isn't apparently
going to say more than he thinks.”

“I hope he thinks more than he says,” sighed the minister. “My
interviews with Lemuel have left me not only exhausted but bruised,
as if I had been hurling myself against a dead wall. Yes, I manage him
better from the pulpit, and I certainly oughtn't to complain. I don't
expect him to make any response, and I perceive that I am not _quite_ so
sore as after meeting him in private life.”

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening Lemuel was helping to throng the platform of an overcrowded
horse-car. It was Saturday night, and he was going to the provision man
up toward the South End, whom Miss Vane was dealing with for the time
being, in an economical recoil from her expensive Back Bay provision
man, to order a forgotten essential of the Sunday's supplies. He had
already been at the grocer's, and was carrying home three or four
packages to save the cart from going a third time that day to
Bolingbroke Street, and he stepped down into the road when two girls
came squeezing their way out of the car.

“Well, I'm glad,” said one of them in a voice Lemuel knew at once, “'t
there's one man's got the politeness to make a _little_ grain o' room
for you. Thank you, sir!” she added, with more scorn for the others than
gratitude for Lemuel. “_You're_ a gentleman, _any_way.”

The hardened offenders on the platform laughed, but Lemuel said simply,
“You're quite welcome.”

“Why, land's sakes!” shouted the girl. “Well, if 'tain't you! S'tira!”
 she exclaimed to her companion in utter admiration. Then she added to
Lemuel, “Why, I didn't s'pose but what you'd a' be'n back home long ago.
Well, I _am_ glad. Be'n in Boston ever since? Well, I want to know!”

The conductor had halted his car for the girls to get off, but, as he
remarked with a vicious jerk at his bell-strap, he could not keep his
car standing there while a woman was asking about the folks, and the
horses started up and left Lemuel behind. “Well, there!” said 'Manda
Grier. “'F I hain't made you lose your car! I never see folks like some
them conductors.”

“Oh, I guess I can walk the rest of the way,” said Lemuel, his face
bright with a pleasure visible in the light of the lamp that brought
out Statira Dudley's smiles and the forward thrust of 'Manda Grier's
whopper-jaw as they turned toward the pavement together.

“

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