I had yet other darker madnesses; had I not been seen spreading upon trees with a whitewash brush a mixture of brown sugar, stale beer, and rum?

Asked to explain this lunatic proceeding I could only say that I was sugaring for moths; these airy fairy gentlemen having a very human liking for a "wee drappie o't."

"That amiable failin'," Major Appleby Cartwright decided, "is a credit to them an' commends them to a respectful hearin'. On its face it would seem to admit them to the ancient an' honorable brotherhood of convivial man. But, suh, there's another side to this question, an' it's this:—a creature that's got six perfectly good legs, not to mention wings, an' still can't carry his liquor without bein' caught, deserves his fate. It's not in my line to offer suggestions to an allwise Providence, or I might hint that a scoop-net an' a killing jar in pickle for some two-legged topers out huntin' free drinks wouldn't be such a bad idea at all."

But as I pursued my buggy way—and displayed, save in this one particular, what might truthfully be called ordinary common sense—people gradually grew accustomed to it, looking upon me as a mild and harmless lunatic whose inoffensive mania might safely be indulged—nay, even humored. In consequence I was from time to time inundated with every common thing that creeps, crawls, and flies. I accepted gifts of bugs and caterpillars that filled my mother with disgust and Clelie with horror; both of them hesitated to come into my study, and I have known Clelie to be afraid to go to bed of a night because the great red-horned "Hickory devil" was downstairs in a box, and she was firmly convinced that this innocent worm harbored a cold-blooded desire to crawl upstairs and bite her. That silly woman will depart this life in the firm faith that all crawling creatures came into the world with the single-hearted hope of biting her, above all other mortals; and that having achieved the end for which they were created, both they and she will immediately curl up and die.

But alas, I had but scant time to devote to this enchanting and engrossing study, which, properly pursued, will fill a man's days to the brim. I gathered my specimens as I could and classified and mounted them as it pleased God—until the advent of John Flint.

Now, I must, with great reluctance, here set down the plain truth that he, too, looked upon me at first with amaze not unmixed with rage and contempt. Most caterpillars, you understand, feed upon food of their own arbitrary choosing; and when they are in captivity one must procure this particular aliment if one hopes to rear them.

Slippy McGee feeding bugs! It was about as hideous and devil-born a contretemps as, say, putting a belted earl to peel potatoes or asking an archbishop to clean cuspidors. The man boiled with offended dignity and outraged pride. One could actually see him swell. He had expected something quite different, and this apparently offensive triviality disgusted and shocked him. I could see myself falling forty thousand fathoms in his esteem, and I think he would have incontinently turned his back upon me save for his promise to Mary Virginia.

It is true that many of the caterpillars are ugly and formidable, poor things, to the uninitiated eye, which fails to recognize under this uncomely disguise the crowned and glorious citizens of the air. I had just then a great Cecropia, an able-bodied green gentleman armed with twelve thorn-like, sizable horns, and wearing, along with other agreeable adornments, three yellow and four red arrangements like growths of dwarf cactus plants on the segments behind his hard round green head.

Mr. Flint, with an ejaculation of horror, backed off on one crutch and clubbed the other.

"My God!" said he, "Kill it! Kill it!" I saved my green friend in the nick of time. The man, with staring eyes, looked from me to the caterpillar; then he leaned over and watched it, in grim silence.

He knotted his forehead, made slits of his eyes, gulped, screwed his mouth into the thin red line of deadly determination, and with every nerve braced, even as a martyr braces himself for the stake or the sword, put out his hand, up which the formidable-looking worm walked leisurely. Death not immediately resulting from this daring act, he controlled his shudders and breathed easier. The worm became less and less terrifying; no longer appearing, say, the size of the boa constrictor. A few moments of this harmless meandering about Mr. Flint's hand and arm, and of a sudden he wore his true colors of an inoffensive and law-abiding larva, anxious only to attend strictly to his own legitimate business, the Gargantuan feeding of himself into the pupa from which he would presently emerge one of the most magnificent of native moths. Gingerly Mr. Flint picked him up between thumb and fore-finger, and as gingerly dropped him back into the breeding-cage. He squared his shoulders, wiped his brow, and drew a long whistling breath.

"Phe-ew! It took all my nerve to do it!" said he, frankly. "I felt for a minute as if a strong-arm cop'd chased me up an alley and pulled his gun on me. The feeling of a bug's legs on your bare skin is something fierce at first, ain't it? But after him none of 'em can scare me any more. I could play tag with pink monkeys with blue tails and green whiskers without sending in the hurry-call."

The setting boards and blocks, the arrays of pins, needles, tubes, forceps, jars and bottles, magnifying-glasses, microscope, slides, drying-ovens, relaxing-box, cabinets, and above all, the mounted specimens, raised his spirits somewhat. This, at least, looked workman-like; this, at least, promised something better than stoking worms!

If not hopefully, at least willingly enough, he allowed himself to be set to work. And that work had come in what some like to call the psychological moment. At least it came—or was sent—just when he needed it most.

He soon discovered, as all beginners must, that there is very much more to it than one might think; that here, too, one must pay for exact knowledge with painstaking care and patient study and ceaseless effort. He discovered how fatally easy it is to spoil a good specimen; how fairy-fragile a wee wing is; how painted scales rub, and vanish into thin air; how delicate antennae break, and forelegs will fiendishly depart hence; and that proper mounting, which results in a perfect insect, is a task which requires practice, a sure eye, and an expert, delicate, and dexterous touch. Also, that one must be ceaselessly on guard lest the baleful little ant and other tiny curses evade one's vigilance and render void one's best work. He learned these and other salutary lessons, which tend to tone down an amateur's conceit of his half-knowledge; and this chastened him. He felt his pride at stake—he who could so expertly, with almost demoniac ingenuity, force the costliest and most cunningly constructed burglar-proof lock; he whose not idle boast was that he was handy with his fingers! Slippy McGee baffled, at bay before a butterfly? And in the presence of a mere priest and a girl-child? Never! He'd show us what he could do when he really tried to try!

Presently he wanted to classify; and he wanted to do it alone and unaided—it looked easy enough. It irked him, pricked his pride, to have to be always asking somebody else "what is this?" And right then and there those inevitable difficulties that confront every earnest and conscientious seeker at the beginning of his quest, arose, as the fascinating living puzzles presented themselves for his solving.

To classify correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them in their proper places.

Mr. Flint tried it—and those wretched creatures wouldn't stay put. It seemed to him that every time he looked at them they ought to be somewhere else; always there was something—a bar, a stripe, a small distinctive spot, a wing of peculiar shape, antennae, or palpi, or spur, to differentiate them.

"Where the Sam Hill," he blazed, "do all these footy little devils come from, anyhow? Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next one that's exactly like it is entirely different the next time you look at it? There's too much beginning and no end at all to this game!"

For all that, he followed them up. I saw with pure joy that he refused to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs. He had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled. First he turned the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his shoulders and hurled himself into work.

There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillae, that splendid Gulf Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South. She's a long-wing, but she's not a Heliconian; she's a silver-spot, but she's not an Argynnis. She bears a striking family likeness to her fine relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which differentiate her. Whose word should he take for this, and why? Wherein lay those differences? He began, patiently, with her cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver. And yet, in spite of her long marvelous tongue—he was beginning to find out that no tool he had ever seen, and but few that God Himself makes, is so wonderful as a butterfly's tongue—she hadn't been able to tell him that about herself which he most wished to find out. That called for a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.

But he knew that other men knew. And he had to know. He meant to know. For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for its service. That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell—a world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon another planet—began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite. And he couldn't break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!

Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners and crannies, or scraping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and disgust, but with the student's interest and pleasure.

"Think of me being in the same world with 'em all these years and not knowing a thing about 'em when there's so much to know, and under my skin stark crazy to learn it, only I didn't know I even wanted to know what I really want to know more than anything else, until I had to get dumped down here to find it out! I get the funniest sort of a feeling, parson, that all along there's been a Me tucked away inside my hide that's been loving these things ever since I was born. Not just to catch and handle 'em, and stretch out their little wings, and remember the names some bughouse high-brow wished on 'em, though all that's in the feeling, too; it's something else, if I could make you understand what I mean."

I laughed. "I think I do understand," said I. "I have a Me like that tucked away in mine, too, you know."

He looked at me gravely. "Parson," said he, earnestly, "there's times I wish you had a dozen kids, and every one of 'em twins! It's a shame to think of some poor orphans swindled out of such a daddy as you'd have made!"

"Why," said I, smiling, "You are one of my twins."

"Me?" He reflected. "Maybe half of me might be, parson," he agreed, "but it's not safe for a skypilot to be caught owning a twin like the other half."

"I'm pinning my faith to my half," said I, serenely.

"Now, why?" he asked, with sudden fierceness. "I turn it over and over and over: it looks white on the outside, but I can't to save me figure out why you're doing it. Parson, what have you got up your sleeve?"

"Nothing but my arm. What should you think?"

"I don't know what to think, and that's the straight of it. What's your game, anyhow? What in the name of God are you after?"

"Why, I think," said I, "that in the name of God I'm after—that other You that's been tucked away all these years, and couldn't get born until a Me inside mine, just like himself, called him to come out and be alive."

He pondered this in silence. Then:

"I'll take your word for it," said he. "Though if anybody'd ever told me I'd be eating out of a parson's hand, I'd have pushed his face in for him. Yep, I'm Fido! Me!"

"At least you growl enough," said I, tartly.

He eyed me askance.

"Have I got to lick hands?" he snarled.

I walked away, without a reply; through my shoulder-blades I could feel him glaring after me. He followed, hobbling:

"Parson!"

"Well?"

"If I'm not the sort that licks hands I'm not the sort that bites 'em, neither. I'll tell you—it's this way: I—sort of get to chewing on that infernal log of wood that's where my good leg used to grow and—and splinters get into my temper—and I've got to snarl or burst wide open! You'd growl like the devil yourself, if you had to try holding down my job for awhile, skypilot or no skypilot!"

"Why—I dare say I should," said I, contritely. "But," I added, after a pause, "I shouldn't be any the better for it, should you think?"

"Not so you could notice," shortly. And after a moment he added, in an altered voice: "Rule 1: Can the Squeal!"

I think he most honestly tried to. It was no easy task, and I have seen the sweat start upon his forehead and his face go pale, when in his eagerness he forgot for a moment the cruel fact that he could no longer move as lightly as of old—and the crippled body, betraying him, reminded him all too swiftly of his mistake.

The work saved him. For it is the heaven-sent sort of work, to those ordained for it, that fills one's hours and leaves one eager for further tasks. It called for all his oldtime ingenuity. His tools, for instance—at times their limitations irked him, and he made others more satisfactory to himself; tools adjusted to an insect's frail body, not to a time-lock. Before that summer ended he could handle even the frailest and tiniest specimen with such nice care that it was delightful to watch him at work. The time was to come when he could mend a torn wing or fix a broken antennas with such exquisite fidelity to detail that even the most expert eye might well be deceived.

I had only looked for a little temporary help, such as any intelligent amateur might be able to furnish. But I was not long unaware that this was more than a mere amateur. To quote himself, he had the goods, and I realized with a mounting heart that I had made a find, if I could only hold on to it. For the first time in years I could exchange specimens. My cabinets began to fill out—with such perfect insects, too! We added several rare ones, a circumstance to make any entomologist look upon the world through rosy spectacles. Why, even the scarce shy Cossus Centerensis came to our very doors, apparently to fill a space awaiting him. Perhaps he was a Buddhist insect undergoing reincarnation, and was anxious to acquire merit by self-immolation. Anyhow, we acquired him, and I hope he acquired merit.

We had scores of insects in the drying ovens. We had more and ever more in the breeding cages,—in our case simple home-made affairs of a keg or a box with a fine wire-netting over the food plant; or a lamp-chimney slipped over a potted plant with a bit of mosquito-netting tied over the top, for the smaller forms.

These cages were a never-failing source of delight and interest to the children, and at their hands heaven rained caterpillars upon us that season. Even my mother grew interested in the work, though Clelie never ceased to look upon it as a horrid madness peculiar to white people.

"All Buckrahs is funny in dey haids," Daddy January consoled her when she complained to him about it. "Dey gets all kind o' fool notions 'bout all kind o' fool t'ings. You ain't got to feel so bad—de Jedge is lots wuss'n yo' boss is. Yo' boss kin see de bugs he run atter, but my boss talk 'bout some kind o' bug he call Germ. I ax um what kind o' bug is dat; an' he 'low you can't see um wid yo' eye. I ain't say so to de Jedge, but I 'low when you see bug you can't see wid yo' eye, you best not seem um 'tall—case he must be some kind o' spook, an' Gawd knows I ain't want to see no spook. Ef de bug ain't no spook, den he mus' be eenside yo' haid, 'stead o' outside um, an' to hab bug on de eenside o' yo' haid is de wuss kind o' bad luck. Anyhow, nobody but Buckrah talk an' ack like dat, niggers is got mo' sense."

We found, presently, a ready and a steady sale for our extra stock. We could supply caterpillars, butterflies and moths, or chrysalids and cocoons; we had some rather scarce ones; and then, our unmounted specimens were so perfect, and our mounted ones so exquisitely done, that we had but little trouble in disposing of them. Under the hand of John Flint these last were really works of art. Not for nothing had he boasted that he was handy with his fingers.

The pretty common forms, framed hovering lifelike over delicately pressed ferns and flowers, found even a readier market, for they were really beautiful. Money had begun to come in—not largely, it is true, but still steadily and surely. You must know how to handle your stock, and you must be in touch with your market—scientists, students, collectors,—and this, of course, takes time. We could supply the larger dealers, too, although they pay less, and we had a modest advertisement in one or two papers published for the profession, which brought us orders. But let no one imagine that it is an easy task to handle these frail bodies, these gossamer wings, so that naturalists and collectors are glad to get them. Once or twice we lost valuable shipments.

Long since—in the late spring, to be exact, John Flint had moved out of the Guest Room, needed for other occupants, into a two-roomed outbuilding across the garden. Some former pastor had had it built for an oratory and retreat, but now, covered with vines, it had stood for many years unused, save as a sort of lumber room.

When the troublesome question of where we might properly house him had arisen, my mother hit upon these unused rooms as by direct inspiration. She had them cleaned, repainted, scoured, and turned into a pleasant well-lighted, airy workroom and living-room combined, and a smaller and rather austere bedroom, with an inexpensive but very good head of Christ over the mantel, and an old, old carved crucifix on the wall beside the white iron bed. Laurence took from his own room a Morris chair, whose somewhat frayed cushions my mother neatly re-covered. Mary Virginia contributed a rug, as well as dressing-gown and slippers. Miss Sally Ruth gave him outright a brand-new Bible, and loaned him an old cedar-wood wardrobe which had been her great-grandmother's, and which still smelt delicately of generations of rose-leaved and lavendered linen.

"All I ask," said Miss Sally Ruth sharply, "is that you'll read Paul with your eyes open and your mouth shut, and that you'll keep your clothes in that wardrobe and your moths out of it. If it was intended for anybody to teach you anything, then Paul will teach you; but it wasn't intended for a cedar-wood wardrobe to hold moths, and I hope you won't forget it!"

Major Cartwright sent over a fishing-rod, a large jar of tobacco, and a framed picture of General Lee.

"Because no man, suh, could live under the same roof with even his pictured semblance, and not be the bettah fo' it," said the major earnestly. "I know. I've got to live with him myself. When I'm fair to middlin' he's in the dinin' room. When I've skidded off the straight an' narrow path I lock him up in the parlor, an' at such times I sleep out on the po'ch. But when I'm at peace with man an' God I take him into my bedroom an' look at him befo' retirin'. He's about as easy to live with as the Angel Gabriel, but he's mighty bracin', Marse Robert is: mighty bracin'!"

Thus equipped, John Flint settled himself in his own house. It had been a wise move, for he had the sense of proprietorship, privacy, and freedom. He could come and go as he pleased, with no one to question. He could work undisturbed, save for the children who brought him such things as they could find. He put his breeding cages out on the vine-covered piazzas surrounding two-sides of his house, arranged the cabinets and boxes which had been removed from my study to his own, nailed up a few shelves to suit himself, and set up housekeeping.

My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved out of the Parish House, and Clelie abated in her dislike of the one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar under her bed. More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning them. He attended to that himself. The man was a marvel of neatness and order. Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat and orderly no woman of Eve's daughters can compare with him. John Flint's rooms would arouse the rabid envy of the cleanest and most scourful she in Holland itself.

Now as the months wore away there had sprung up between him, and Mary Virginia and Laurence, one of those odd comradely friendships which sometime unite the totally unlike with bonds hard to break. His spotless workroom had a fascination for the youngsters. They were always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and then again to see how those they had already brought were getting along.

The lame man was an unrivaled listener—a circumstance which endeared him to youthful Laurence, in whom thoughts and the urge to express these thoughts in words rose like sap. This fresh and untainted confidence, poured out so naively, taught John Flint more than any words or prayers of mine could have done. It opened to him a world into which, his eyes had not heretofore been permitted to look; and the result was all the more sure and certain, in that the children had no faintest idea of the effect they were producing. They had no end to gain, no ax to grind; they merely spoke the truth as they knew it, and this unselfish and hopeful truthfulness aroused his interest and curiosity; it even compelled his admiration. He couldn't dismiss this as "hot air"!

I was more than glad to have him thus taught. It was a salutary lesson, tending to temper his overweening confidence and to humble his contemptuous pride. In his own world he had been supreme, a figure of sinister importance. Brash had been crook or cop who had taught or caught Slippy McGee! But in this new atmosphere, in which he breathed with difficulty, the young had been given him for guides. They led him, where a grownup had failed.

Mary Virginia was particularly fond of him. He had as little to say to her as to Laurence, but he looked at her with interested eyes that never lost a movement; she knew he never missed a word, either; his silence was friendly, and the little girl had a pleasant fashion of taking folk for granted. Hers was one of those large natures which give lavishly, shares itself freely, but does not demand much in return. She gave with an open hand to her quiet listener—her books, her music, her amusing and innocent views, her frank comments, her truthfulness, her sweet brave gaiety; and he absorbed it like a sponge. It delighted her to find and bring the proper food-plants for his cages. And she being one of those who sing while they work, you might hear her caroling like a lark, flitting about the old garden with her red setter Kerry at her heels.

Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to smoke,—to buy books upon lepidoptera.

He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens were such fools he couldn't help hating them. Madame said she liked to have him around, for he was more like some unobtrusive jinnee than a mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a "growing hand"—he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and it grew like Jonah's gourd.

Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who shared Father De Rance's madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained to some why he had been a tramp!

Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clelie's little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.

Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own cats might an interloping stray dog.

"The fellow's not very prepossessing," he told me, of an evening when he had dined with us, "but I've been on the bench long enough to be skeptical of any fixed good or bad type—I've found that the criminal type is any type that goes wrong; so I shouldn't go so far as to call this chap a bad egg. But—I hope you are reasonably sure of him, father?"

"Reasonably," said I, composedly.

"Laurence tells me Madame and Mary Virginia like the fellow. H'm! Well, I've acquired a little faith in the intuition of women—some women, understand, and some times. And mark you, I didn't say judgment. Let us hope that this is one of the times when faith in intuition will be justified."

Later, when he had had time to examine the work progressing under the flexible fingers of the silent workman, he withdrew with more respect.

"I suppose he's all right, if you think so, father. But I'd watch out for him, anyway," he advised.

"That is exactly what I intend to do."

"Rather he fell into your hands than mine. Better for him," said the judge, briefly. Then he launched into an intimate talk of Laurence, and in thus talking of the boy's future, forgot my helper.

That was it, exactly. The man was so unobtrusive without in the least being furtive. Had so little to say; attended so strictly to his own business, and showed himself so utterly and almost inhumanly uninterested in anybody else's, that he kept in the background. He was there, and people knew it; they were, in a sense, interested in him, but not curious about him.

One morning in early autumn—he had been with us then some eight or nine months—I went over to his rooms with a New York newspaper in my hand. It had news that set my heart to pounding sickeningly—news that at once simplified and yet complicated matters. I hesitated as to whether or not I should tell him, but decided that whatever effect that news might produce, I would deal with him openly, above board, and always with truth. He must act and judge for himself and with his eyes open. On my part there should be no concealment.

The paper stated that the body of a man found floating in the East River had been positively identified by the police as that of Slippy McGee. That the noted crook had gotten back into New York through the cunning dragnet so carefully spread for him was another proof of his daring and dexterity. How he met the dark fate which set him adrift, battered and dreadful, in the East River, was another of those underworld crimes that remain unsolved. Cunning and dangerous, mysterious in his life, baffling all efforts to get at him, he was as evilly mysterious in his death. There was only one thing sure—that this dead wretch with the marks of violence upon him was Slippy McGee; and since his breath had ceased, the authorities could breathe easier.

He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the paper. A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his hand, musingly. The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust itself forward.

"Dead, huh?" he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting movement of the head. "Well—I might just as well be, as buried alive in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!" Once again the Powers of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.

"What am I doing here, anyhow?" he snarled with his lips drawn back from his teeth. "Piddling with bugs—Me! Patching up their dinky little wings and stretching out their dam' little legs and feelers—me being what I am, and they being what they are! Say, I've got to quit this, once for all I've got to quit it. I'm not a man any more. I'm a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing their interesting little babies. My God! Me!" And he threw his hands above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.

"Hanging on here like a boob—no wonder they think I'm dead! If I could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land enough—"

"You couldn't keep it, if you did land it—your sort can't. You know how it went before—the women and the sharks got it. There'd be always that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going—until you'd pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there. And there's the drug-danger, too. If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had the strength to let drugs alone. But the drugs get you, sooner or later, do they not? Have you not told me over and over again that 'nearly all dips are dopes'? That first the dope gets you—and then the law? No. You can't pull off anything that won't pull you into hell. We have gone over this thing often enough, haven't we?"

"No, we haven't. And I haven't had a chance to pull off anything—except leaves for bugs. Me! I want to get my hand in once more, I tell you! I want to pull off a stunt that'll make the whole bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair—and I can do it, easy as easy. Think I've croaked, do they? And they can all snooze on their peg-posts, now I'm a stiff? Well, by cripes, I just want half of a half of a chance, and I'll show 'em Slippy McGee's good and plenty alive!"

"Come out into the garden, my son, and feel that you are good and plenty alive. Come out into the free air. Hold on tight, a little while longer!"

I laid my hand upon his shoulder compellingly, and although he glared at me, and ground his teeth, and lifted his lip, he came; unwillingly, swearing under his breath, he came. We tramped up and down the garden paths, up and down, and back again, his wooden peg making a round hole, like a hoofmark, in the earth. He stared down at it, spat savagely upon it, and swore horribly, but not too loudly.

"I want to feel like a live man!" he gritted. "A live man, not a one-legged mucker with a beard like a Dutch bomb-thrower's, puttering about a skypilot's backyard on the wrong side of everything!"

"Stick it out a little longer, John Flint; hold fast!"

"Hold fast to what?" he demanded savagely. "To a bug stuck on a needle?"

"Yes. And to me who trusts you. To Madame who likes you. To the dear child who put bug and needle into your hand because she knew it was good work and trusted your hand to do it. And more than all, to that other Me you're finding—your own true self, John Flint! Hold fast, hold fast!"

He stopped and stared at me.

"I'm believing him again!" said he, grievously. "I've been sat on while I was hot, and my number's marked on me, 23. I'm hoodooed, that's what!"

Tramp, tramp, stump, stump, up and down, the two of us.

"All right, devil-dodger," said he wearily, after a long sullen silence. "I'll stick it out a bit longer, to please you. You've been white—the lot of you. But look here—if I beat it some night ... with what I can find, why, I'm warning you: don't blame me—you're running your risks, and it'll be up to you to explain!"

"When you want to go, John Flint—when you really and truly want to go, why, take anything I have that you may fancy, my son. I give it you beforehand."

"I don't want anything given to me beforehand!" he growled. "I want to take what I want to take without anybody's leave!"

"Very well, then; take what you want to take, without anybody's leave! I shall be able to do without it, I dare say."

He turned upon me furiously:

"Oh, yes, I guess you can! You'd do without eating and breathing too, I suppose, if you could manage it! You do without too blamed much right now, trying to beat yourself to being a saint! Of course I'd help myself and leave you to go without—you're enough to make a man ache to shoot some sense into you with a cannon! And for God's sake, who are you pinching and scraping and going without for? A bunch of hickey factory-shuckers that haven't got sense enough to talk American, and a lot of mill-hands with beans on 'em like bone buttons! They ain't worth it. While I'm in the humor, take it from me there ain't anybody worth anything anyhow!"

"Oh, Mr. Flint! What a shame and a sin!" called another voice. "Oh, Mr. Flint, I'm ashamed of you!" There in the freedom of the Saturday morning sunlight stood Mary Virginia, her red Irish setter Kerry beside her.

"I came over," said she, "to see how the baby-moths are getting on this morning, and to know if the last hairy gentleman I brought spins into a cocoon or buries himself in the ground. And then I heard Mr. Flint—and what he said is unkind, and untrue, and not a bit like him. Why, everybody's worth everything you can do for them—only some are worth more."

The wild wrath died out of his face. As usual, he softened at sight of her.

"Oh, well, miss, I wasn't thinking of the like of you—and him," he jerked his head at me, half apologetically, "nor young Mayne, nor the little Madame. You're different."

"Why, no, we aren't, really," said Mary Virginia, puckering her brows adorably. "We only seem to be different—but we are just exactly like everybody else, only we know it, and some people never can seem to find it out—and there's the difference! You see?" That was the befuddled manner in which Mary Virginia very often explained things. If God was good to you, you got a little glimmer of what she meant and was trying to tell you. Mary Virginia often talked as the alchemists used to write—cryptically, abstrusely, as if to hide the golden truth from all but the initiate.

"Come and shake hands with Mr. Flint, Kerry," said she to the setter. "I want you to help make him understand things it's high time he should know. Nobody can do that better than a good dog can."

Kerry looked a trifle doubtful, but having been told to do a certain thing, he obeyed, as a good dog does. Gravely he sat up and held out an obedient paw, which the man took mechanically. But meeting the clear hazel eyes, he dropped his hand upon the shining head with the gesture of one who desires to become friends. Accepting this, Kerry reached up a nose and nuzzled. Then he wagged his plumy tail.

"There!" said Mary Virginia, delightedly. "Now, don't you see how horrid it was to talk the way you talked? Why, Kerry likes you, and Kerry is a sensible dog."

"Yes, miss," and he looked at Mary Virginia very much as the dog did, trustingly, but a little bewildered.

"Aren't you sorry you said that?"

"Y-e-s, seeing you seem to think it was wrong."

"Well, you'll know better from now on," said Mary Virginia, comfortingly. She looked at him searchingly for a minute, and he met her look without flinching. That had been the one hopeful sign, from the first—that he never refused to meet your glance, but gave you back one just as steady, if more suspicious.

"Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia, "you've about made up your mind to stay on here with the Padre, haven't you? For a good long while, at any rate? You wouldn't like to leave the Padre, would you?"

He stiffened. One could see the struggle within him.

"Well, miss, I can't see but that I've just got to stay on—for awhile. Until he's tired of me and my ways, anyhow," he said gloomily.

Mary Virginia dismissed my tiredness with an airy wave of her hand. She smiled.

"Do you know," said she earnestly, "I've had the funniest idea about you, from the very first time I saw you? Well, I have. I've somehow got the notion that you and the Padre belong. I think that's why you came. I think you belong right here, in that darling little house, studying butterflies and mounting them so beautifully they look alive. I think you're never going to go away anywhere any more, but that you're going to stay right here as long as you live!"

His face turned an ugly white, and his mouth fell open. He looked at Mary Virginia almost with horror—Saul might have looked thus at the Witch of Endor when she summoned the shade of Samuel to tell him that the kingdom had been rent from his hand and his fate was upon him.

Mary Virginia nodded, thoughtfully.

"I feel so sure of it," said she, confidently, "that I'm going to ask you to do me a favor. I want you to take care of Kerry for me. You know I'm going away to school next week, and—he can't stay at home when I'm not there. My father's away frequently, and he couldn't take Kerry about with him, of course. And he couldn't be left with the servants—somehow he doesn't like the colored people. He always growls at them, and they're afraid of him. And my mother dislikes dogs intensely—she's afraid of them, except those horrible little toy-things that aren't dogs any more." The scorn of the real dog-lover was in her voice. "Kerry's used to the Parish House. He loves the Padre, he'll soon love you, and he likes to play with Pitache, so Madame wouldn't mind his being here. And—I'd be more satisfied in my mind if he were with somebody that—that needed him—and would like him a whole lot—somebody like you," she finished.

Now, Mary Virginia regarded Kerry even as the apple of her eye. The dog was a noble and beautiful specimen of his race, thoroughbred to the bone, a fine field dog, and the pride of the child's heart. He was what only that most delightful of dogs, a thoroughbred Irish setter, can be. John Flint gasped. Something perplexed, incredulous, painful, dazzled, crept into his face and looked out of his eyes.

"Me?" he gasped. "You mean you're willing to let me keep your dog for you? Yours?"

"I want to give him to you," said Mary Virginia bravely enough, though her voice trembled. "I am perfectly sure you'll love him—better than any one else in the world would, except me myself. I don't know why I know that, but I do know it. If you wanted to go away, later on, why, you could turn him over to the Padre, because of course you wouldn't want to have a dog following you about everywhere. They're a lot of bother. But—somehow, I think you'll keep him. I think you'll love him. He—he's a darling dog." She was too proud to turn her head aside, but two large tears rolled down her cheeks, like dew upon a rose.

John Flint stood stock-still, looking from her to the dog, and back again. Kerry, sensing that something was wrong with his little mistress, pawed her skirts and whined.

"Now I come to think of it," said John Flint slowly, "I never had anything—anything alive, I mean—belong to me before."

Mary Virginia glanced up at him shrewdly, and smiled through her tears. Her smile makes a funny delicious red V of her lower lip, and is altogether adorable and seductive.

"That's just exactly why you thought nobody was worth anything," she said. Then she bent over her dog and kissed him between his beautiful hazel eyes.

"Kerry, dear," said she, "Kerry, dear Kerry, you don't belong to me any more. I—I've got to go away to school—and you know you wouldn't be happy at home without me. You belong to Mr. Flint now, and I'm sure he needs you, and I know he'll love you almost as much as I do, and he'll be very, very good to you. So you're to stay with him, and—stand by him and be his dog, like you were mine. You'll remember, Kerry? Good-by, my dear, dear, darling dog!" She kissed him again, patted him, and thrust his collar into his new owner's hand.

"Go—good-by, everybody!" said she, in a muffled voice, and ran. I think she would have cried childishly in another moment; and she was trying hard to remember that she was growing up!

John Flint stood staring after her, his hand on the dog's collar, holding him in. His face was still without a vestige of color, and his eyes glittered. Then his other hand crept out to touch the dog's head.

"It's wet—where she dropped tears on it! Parson ... she's given me her dog ... that she loves enough to cry over!"

"He's a very fine dog, and she has had him and loved him from his puppyhood," I reminded him. And I added, with a wily tongue: "You can always turn him over to me, you know—if you decide to take to the road and wish to get rid of a troublesome companion. A dog is bad company for a man who wishes to dodge the police."

But he only shook his head. His eyes were troubled, and his forehead wrinkled.

"Parson," said he, hesitatingly, "did you ever feel like you'd been caught by—by Something reaching down out of the dark? Something big that you couldn't see and couldn't ever hope to get away from, because it's always on the job? Ain't it a hell of a feeling?"

"Yes," I agreed. "I've felt—caught by that Something, too. And it is at first a terrifying sensation. Until—you learn to be glad."

"You're caught—and you know under your hat you're never going to be able to get away any more. It'll hold you till you die!" said he, a little wildly. "My God! I'm caught! First It bit off a leg on me, so I couldn't run. Then It wished you and your bugs on me. And now—Yes, sir; I'm done for. That kid got my goat this morning. My God, who'd believe it? But it's true: I'm done for. She gave me her dog and she got my goat!"



CHAPTER VI

"THY SERVANT WILL GO AND FIGHT WITH THIS PHILISTINE" 1 Sam. 17: 32.

Mary Virginia had gone, weeping and bewept, and the spirit of youth seemed to have gone with her, leaving the Parish House darkened because of its absence. A sorrowful quiet brooded over the garden that no longer echoed a caroling voice. Kerry, seeking vainly for the little mistress, would come whining back to John Flint, and look up mutely into his face; and finding no promise there, lie down, whimpering, at his feet. The man seemed as desolate as the dog, because of the child's departure.

"When I come back," Mary Virginia said to him at parting, "I expect you'll know more about moths and butterflies than anybody else in the world does. You're that sort. I'd love to be here, watching you grow up into it, but I've got to go away and grow up into something myself. I'm very glad you came here, Mr. Flint. You've helped me, lots."

"Me?" with husky astonishment.

"You, of course," said the child, serenely. "Because you are such a good man, Mr. Flint, and so patient, and you stick at what you try to do until you do it better than anybody else does. Often and often when I've been trying to do sums—I'm frightfully stupid about arithmetic—and I wanted to give up, I'd think of you over here just trying and trying and keeping right on trying, until you'd gotten what you wanted to know; and then I'd keep on trying, too. The funny part is, that I like you for making me do it. You see, I'm a very, very bad person in some things, Mr. Flint," she said frankly. "Why, when my mother has to tell me to look at so and so, and see how well they behave, or how nicely they can do certain things, and how good they are, and why don't I profit by such a good example, a perfectly horrid raging sort of feeling comes all over me, and I want to be as naughty as naughty! I feel like doing and saying things I'd never want to do or say, if it wasn't for that good example. I just can't seem to bear being good-exampled. But you're different, thank goodness. Most really good people are different, I guess."

He looked at her, dumbly—he had no words at his command. She missed the irony and the tragedy, but she sensed the depths of feeling under that mute exterior.

"I'm glad you're sorry I'm going away," said she, with the directness that was so engaging. "I perfectly love people to feel sorry to part with me. I hope and hope they'll keep on being sorry—because they'll be that much gladder when I come back. I don't believe there's anything quite so wonderful and beautiful as having other folks like you, except it's liking other folks yourself!"

"I never had to be bothered about it, either way," said he dryly. His face twitched.

"Maybe that's because you never stayed still long enough in any one place to catch hold," said she, and laughed at him.

"Good-by, Mr. Flint! I'll never see a butterfly or a moth, the whole time I'm gone, without making believe he's a messenger from Madame, and the Padre, and you, and Kerry. I'll play he's a carrier-butterfly, with a message tucked away under his wings: 'Howdy, Mary Virginia! I've just come from flying over the flowers in the Parish House garden; and the folks are all well, and busy, and happy. But they haven't forgotten you for a single solitary minute, and they miss you and wish you'd come back; and they send you their dear, dear love—and I'll carry your dear, dear love back to them!' So if you see a big, big, beautiful, strange fellow come sailing by your window some morning, why, that's mine, Mr. Flint! Remember!"

And then she was gone, and he had his first taste of unselfish human sorrow. Heretofore his worries had been purely personal and self-centered: this was different, and innocent. It shocked and terrified him to find out how intensely he could miss another being, and that being a mere child. He wasn't used to that sort of pain, and it bewildered him.

Eustis himself had wanted the little girl sent to a preparatory school which would fit her for one of the women's colleges. He had visions of the forward sweep of women—visions which his wife didn't share. Her daughter should go to the Church School at which she herself had been educated, an exclusive and expensive institution where the daughters of the wealthy were given a finishing hand-polish with ecclesiastical emery, as a sort of social hall-mark. Mrs. Eustis had a horror of what she called, in quotation-marks, the modern non-religious method of educating young ladies.

The Eustis house was closed, and left in charge of the negro caretakers, for Mrs. Eustis couldn't stand the loneliness of the place after the child's departure, and Eustis himself found his presence more and more necessary at the great plantation he was building up. Mrs. Eustis left Appleboro, and my mother missed her. There was a vein of pure gold underlying the placid little woman's character, which the stronger woman divined and built upon.

Laurence, too, entered college that Fall. I had coached him, in such hours as I could spare. He was conscientious enough, though his Greek was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a French she said was spoke

full fair and fetisly After ye schole of Strattford atte Bowe.

But if he hadn't Mary Virginia's sensitiveness to all beauty, nor her playful fancy and vivid imagination, he was clear-brained and clean-thinking, with that large perspective and that practical optimism which seem to me so essentially American. He saw without confusion both the thing as it was and as it could become. With only enough humor to save him, he had a sternness more of the puritan than of the cavalier blood from which he had sprung. Above all was he informed with that new spirit brooding upon the face of all the waters, a spirit that for want of a better name one might call the Race Conscience.

It was this last aspect of the boy's character that amazed and interested John Flint, who was himself too shrewd not to divine the sincerity, even the commonsense, of what Laurence called "applied Christianity." Altruism—and Slippy McGee! He listened with a puzzled wonder.

"I wish," he grumbled to Laurence, "that you'd come off the roof. It gives a fellow stiff neck rubbering up at you!"

"I'd rather stay up—the air's better, and you can see so much farther," said Laurence. And he added hospitably: "There's plenty of room—come on up, yourself!"

"With one leg?" sarcastically.

"And two eyes," said the boy. "Come on up—the sky's fine!" And he laughed into the half-suspicious face.

The gimlet eyes bored into him, and the frank and truthful eyes met them unabashed, unwavering, with a something in them which made the other blink.

"When I got pitched into this burg," said the lame man thoughtfully, "I landed all there—except a leg, but I never carried my brains in my legs. I hadn't got any bats in my belfry. But I'm getting 'em. I'm getting 'em so bad that when I hear some folks talk bughouse these days it pretty near listens like good sense to me. Why, kid, I'm nut enough now to dangle over the edge of believing you know what you're talking about!"

"Fall over: I know I know what I'm talking about," said Laurence magnificently.

"I'm double-crossed," said John Flint, soberly and sadly, "Anyway I look at it—" he swept the horizon with a wide-flung gesture, "it's bugs for mine. I began by grannying bugs for him," he tossed his head bull-like in my direction, "and I stand around swallowing hot air from you—" He glared at Laurence, "and what's the result? Why, that I've got bugs in the bean, that's what! Think of me licking an all-day sucker a kid dopes out! Me! Oh, he—venly saints!" he gulped. "Ain't I the nut, though?"

"Well, supposing?" said Laurence, laughing. "Buck up! You could be a bad egg instead of a good nut, you know!"

John Flint's eyes slitted, then widened; his mouth followed suit almost automatically. He looked at me.

"Can you beat it?" he wondered.

"Beating a bad egg would be a waste of time I wouldn't be guilty of," said I amusedly. "But I hope to live to see the good nut grow into a fine tree."

"Do your damnedest—excuse me, parson!" said he contritely. "I mean, don't stop for a little thing like me!"

Laurence leaned forward. "Man," said he, impressively, "he won't have to! You'll be marking time and keeping step with him yourself before you know it!"

"Huh!" said John Flint, non-committally.



Laurence came to spend his last evening at home with us.

"Padre," said he, when we walked up and down in the garden, after an old custom, after dinner, "do you really know what I mean to do when I've finished college and start out on my own hook?"

"Put 'Mayne & Son' on the judge's shingle and walk around the block forty times a day to look at it!" said I, promptly.

"Of course," said he. "That first. But a legal shingle can be turned into as handy a weapon as one could wish for, Padre, and I'm going to take that shingle and spank this sleepy-headed old town wide awake with it!" He spoke with the conviction of youth, so sure of itself that there is no room for doubt. There was in him, too, a hint of latent power which was impressive. One did not laugh at Laurence.

"It's my town," with his chin out. "It could be a mighty good town. It's going to become one. I expect to live all my life right here, among my own people, and they've got to make it worth my while. I don't propose to cut myself down to fit any little hole: I intend to make that hole big enough to fit my possible measure."

"May an old friend wish more power to your shovel?"

"It'll be a steam shovel!" said he, gaily. Then his face clouded.

"Padre! I'm sick of the way things are run in Appleboro! I've talked with other boys and they're sick of it, too. You know why they want to get away? Because they think they haven't got even a fighting chance here. Because towns like this are like billion-ton old wagons sunk so deep in mudruts that nothing but dynamite can blow them out—and they are not dealers in dynamite. If they want to do anything that even looks new they've got to fight the stand-patters to a finish, and they're blockaded by a lot of reactionaries that don't know the earth's moving. There are a lot of folks in the South, Padre, who've been dead since the civil war, and haven't found it out themselves, and won't take live people's word for it. Well, now, I mean to do things. I mean to do them right here. And I certainly shan't allow myself to be blockaded by anybody, living or dead. You've got to fight the devil with fire;—I'm going to blockade those blockaders, and see that the dead ones are decently buried."

"You have tackled a big job, my son."

"I like big jobs, Padre. They're worth while. Maybe I'll be able to keep some of the boys home—the town needs them. Maybe I can keep some of those poor kids out of the mills, too. Oh, yes, I expect a right lively time!"

I was silent. I knew how supinely Appleboro lay in the hollow of a hard hand. I had learned, too, how such a hand can close into a strangling fist.

"Of course I can't clean up the whole state, and I can't reorganize the world," said the boy sturdily. "I'm not such a fool as to try. But I can do my level best to disinfect my own particular corner, and make it fit for men and safe for women and kids to live and breathe in. Padre, for years there hasn't been a rotten deal nor a brazen steal in this state that the man who practically owns and runs this town hadn't a finger in, knuckle-deep. He's got to go."

"Goliath doesn't always fall at the hand of the son of Jesse, my little David," said I quietly. I also had dreamed dreams and seen visions.

"That's about what my father says," said the boy. "He wants me to be a successful man, a 'safe and sane citizen.' He thinks a gentleman should practise his profession decently and in order. But to believe, as I do, that you can wipe out corruption, that you can tackle poverty the same as you would any other disease, and prevent it, as smallpox and yellow fever are prevented, he looks upon as madness and a waste of time."

"He has had sorrow and experience, and he is kind and charitable, as well as wise," said I.

"That's exactly where the hardest part comes in for us younger fellows. It isn't bucking the bad that makes the fight so hard: it's bucking the wrong-idea'd good. Padre, one good man on the wrong side is a stumbling-block for the stoutest-hearted reformer ever born. It's men like my father, who regard the smooth scoundrel that runs this town as a necessary evil, and tolerate him because they wouldn't soil their hands dealing with him, that do the greatest injury to the state. I tell you what, it wouldn't be so hard to get rid of the devil, if it weren't for the angels!"

"And how," said I, ironically, "do you propose to set about smoothing the rough and making straight the crooked, my son?"

"Flatten 'em out," said he, briefly. "Politics. First off I'm going to practice general law; then I'll be solicitor-general for this county. After that, I shall be attorney-general for the state. Later I may be governor, unless I become senator instead."

"Well," said I, cautiously, "you'll be so toned down by that time that you might make a very good governor indeed."

"I couldn't very well make a worse one than some we've already had," said the boy sternly. There was something of the accusing dignity of a young archangel about him. I caught a glimpse of that newer America growing up about us—an America gone back to the older, truer, unbuyable ideals of our fathers.

"I guess you'd better tell me good-by now, Padre," said he, presently. "And bless me, please—it's a pretty custom. I won't see you again, for you'll be saying mass when I'm running for my train. I'll go tell John Flint good-by, too."

He went over and rapped on the window, through which we could see Flint sitting at his table, his head bent over a book.

"Good-by, John Flint" said Laurence. "Good luck to you and your leggy friends! When I come back you'll probably have mandibles, and you'll greet me with a nip, in pure Bugese."

"Good-by," said John Flint, lifting his head. Then, with unwonted feeling: "I'm horrible sorry you've got to go—I'll miss you something fierce. You've been very kind—thank you."

"Mind you take care of the Padre," said the boy, waiving the thanks with a smile. "Don't let him work too hard."

"Who, me?" Flint's voice took the knife-edge of sarcasm. "Oh, sure! It don't need but one leg to keep up with a gent trying to run a thirty-six hour a day job with one-man power, does it? Son, take it from me, when a man's got the real, simonpure, no-imitation, soulsaving bug in his bean, a forty-legged cyclone couldn't keep up with him, much less a guy with one pedal short." He glared at me indignantly. From the first it has been one of his vainest notions that I am perversely working myself to death.

"There's nothing to be done with the Padre, then, I'm afraid," said Laurence, chuckling.

"I might soak him in the cyanide jar for ten minutes a day without killing him," mused Mr. Flint. "But," disgustedly, "what'd be the use? When he came to and found he'd been that long idle he'd die of heart-failure." He pushed aside the window screen, and the two shook hands heartily. Then the boy, wringing my hand again, walked away without another word. I felt a bit desolate—there are times when I could envy women their solace of tears—as if he figured in his handsome young person that newer, stronger, more conquering generation which was marching ahead, leaving me, older and slower and sadder, far, far behind it. Ah! To be once more that young, that strong, that hopeful!

When I began to reflect upon what seemed visionary plans, I was saddened, foreseeing inevitable disillusion, perhaps even stark failure, ahead of him. That he would stubbornly try to carry out those plans I did not doubt: I knew my Laurence. He might accomplish a certain amount of good. But to overthrow Inglesby, the Boss of Appleboro—for he meant no less than this—why, that was a horse of another color!

For Inglesby was our one great financial figure. He owned our bank; his was the controlling interest in the mills; he owned the factory outright; he was president of half a dozen corporations and chairman and director of many more.

Did we have a celebration? There he was, in the center of the stage, with a jovial loud laugh and an ultra-benevolent smile to hide the menace of his little cold piglike eyes, and the meaning of his heavy jaw. Will the statement that he had a pew in every church in town explain him? He had one in mine, too; paid for, which many of them are not.

At the large bare office in the mill he was easy of access, and would listen to what you had to say with flattering attention and sympathy. But it was in his private office over the bank that this large spider really spun the web of our politics. Mills, banks, churches, schools, lights, railroads, stores, heating, water-power—all these juicy flies apparently walked into his parlor of their own accord. He had made and unmade governors; he had sent his men to Washington. How? We suspected; but held our peace. If our Bible had bidden us Americans to suffer rascals gladly—instead of mere fools—we couldn't be more obedient to a mandate.

Men like James Eustis and Judge Mayne despised Inglesby—but gave him a wide berth. They wouldn't be enmeshed. It was known that Major Appleby Cartwright had blackballed him.

"I can stand a man, suh, that likes to get along in this world—within proper bounds. But Inglesby hasn't got any proper bounds. He's a—a cross between a Republican mule and a party-bolting boa-constrictor, an' a hybrid like that hasn't got any place in nature. On top of that he drinks ten cents a bottle grape juice and smokes five cent cigars. And he's got the brazen and offensive effrontery to offer 'em to self-respectin' men!"

And here was Laurence, our little Laurence, training himself to overthrow this overgrown Goliath! Well, if the boy could not bring this Philistine to the earth, he might yet manage to give him a few manful clumps on the head; perhaps enough to insure a chronic headache.

So thinking, I went in and watched John Flint finish a mounting-block from a plan in the book open upon the table, adding, however, certain improvements of his own.

He laid the block aside and then took a spray of fresh leaves and fed it to a horned and hungry caterpillar prowling on a bit of bare stem at the bottom of his cage.

"Get up there on those leaves, you horn-tailed horror! Move on,—you lepidopterous son of a wigglejoint, or I'll pull your real name on you in a minute and paralyze you stiff!" He drew a long breath. "You know how I'm beginning to remember their real names? I swear 'em half an hour a day. Next time you have trouble with those hickeys of yours, try swearing caterpillar at 'em, and you'll find out."

I laughed, and he grinned with me.

"Say," said he, abruptly. "I've been listening with both my ears to what that boy was talking to you about awhile ago. Thinks he can buck the Boss, does he?"

"Perhaps he may," I admitted.

"Nifty old bird, the Big Un," said Mr. Flint, squinting his eyes. "And," he went on, reflectively, "he's sure got your number in this burg. Take you by and large, you lawabiders are a real funny sort, ain't you? Now, there's Inglesby, handing out the little kids their diplomas come school-closing, and telling 'em to be real good, and maybe when they grow up he'll have a job in pickle for 'em—work like a mule in a treadmill, twelve hours, no unions, and the coroner to sit on the remains, free and gratis, for to ease the widow's mind. Inglesby's got seats in all your churches—first-aid to the parson's pants-pockets.

"Inglesby's right there on the platform at all your spiel-fests, smirking at the women and telling 'em not to bother their nice little noddles about anything but holding down their natural jobs of being perfect ladies—ain't he and other gents just like him always right there holding down their natural jobs of protecting 'em and being influenced to do what's right? Sure he is! And nobody howls for the hook! You let him be It—him with a fist in the state's jeans up to the armpit!

"Look here, that Mayne kid's dead right. It's you good guys that are to blame. We little bad ones see you kowtowing to the big worse ones, and we get to thinking we can come in under the wires easy winners, too. However, let me tell you something while I'm in the humor to gas. It's this: sooner or later everybody gets theirs. My sort and Inglesby's sort, we all get ours. Duck and twist and turn and sidestep all we want, at the end it's right there waiting for us, with a loaded billy up its sleeve: Ours! Some fine day when we're looking the other way, thinking we've even got it on the annual turnout of the cops up Broadway for class, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs, spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what's coming to us, biff! and we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday and year-after-next. I got mine. If I was you I wouldn't be too cock-sure that kid don't give Inglesby his, some of these days, good and plenty."

"Maybe so," said I, cautiously.

"Gee, that'd be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn't it?" he grinned. "Sure! I can see 'em now, patting the bump on their beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of swatting sinners in their dinners. Yet they'll all of them go right on leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that's got the nerve to do them! Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!"

"Thank you," said I, with due meekness.

"Keep the change," said he, unabashed. "I wasn't meaning you, anyhow. I've got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson, you don't need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me, I'd bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I'd put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles. Believe me, he'd do it!" he finished, with enthusiasm.

Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.

"Yep, ten orders in to-day's mail and seven in yesterday's; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on. And here's a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We're looking up," said he, complacently.



The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty. I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame's right hand man and Westmoreland's faithful ally. His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient. He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.

"He may have only one leg," said Westmoreland, when Flint had helped him all of one night with a desperately ill millworker, "but he certainly has two hands; he knows how to use his ears and eyes, he's dumb until he ought to speak, and then he speaks to the point. Father, Something knew what It was about when you and I were allowed to drag that tramp out of the teeth of death! Yes, yes, I'm certainly glad and grateful we were allowed to save John Flint."

From that time forth the big man gave his ex-patient a liking which grew with his years. Absent-minded as he was, he could thereafter always remember to find such things as he thought might interest him. Appleboro laughs yet about the day Dr. Westmoreland got some small butterflies for his friend, and having nowhere else to put them, clapped them under his hat, and then forgot all about them; until he lifted his hat to some ladies and the swarm of insects flew out.

Without being asked, and as unostentatiously as he did everything else, Flint had taken his place in church every Sunday.

"Because it'd sort of give you a black eye if I didn't," he explained. "Skypiloting's your lay, father, and I'll see you through with it as far as I can. I couldn't fall down on any man that's been as white to me as you've been."

I must confess that his conception of religion was very, very hazy, and his notions of church services and customs barbarous. For instance, he disliked the statues of the saints exceedingly. They worried him.

"I can't seem to stand a man dolled-up in skirts," he confessed. "Any more than I'd be stuck on a dame with whiskers. It don't somehow look right to me. Put the he-saints in pants instead of those brown kimonas with gold crocheting and a rope sash, and I'd have more respect for 'em."

When I tried to give him some necessary instructions, and to penetrate the heathen darkness in which he seemed immersed, he listened with the utmost respect and attention—and wrinkled his brow painfully, and blinked, and licked his lips.

"That's all right, father, that's all right. If you say it's so, I guess it's so. I'll take your word for it. If it's good enough for you and Madame, there's got to be something in it, and it's sure good enough for me. Look here: the little girl and young Mayne have got a different brand from yours, haven't they?"

"Neither of them is of the Old Faith."

"Huh! Well, I tell you what you do: you just switch me in somewhere between you and Madame and him and her. That'll give me a line on all of you—and maybe it'll give all of you a line on me. See?"

I saw, but as through a glass darkly. So the matter rested. And I must in all humility set down that I have never yet been able to get at what John Flint really believes he believes.



CHAPTER VII

THE GOING OF SLIPPY MCGEE

Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the Pacific, during the years' slow upward march had John Flint grown.

Nature had never meant him for a criminal. The evil conditions that society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him no opportunity to be right. Now even among butterflies there are occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions. Give the grub his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal butterfly. That is the Law.

At a crucial phase in this man's career his true talisman—a gray moth—had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his rightful heritage.

I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump upon it bears to the head of a young dog. Its chrysalis looks so much like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it, fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.

"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for all a man's eyes can see!

"And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it! I've seen it with my own eyes, but how it's done I don't know; no, nor no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself. What does it? What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the dark? What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what's coming—how does it know there's ever going to be a call, or that it'll hear it without fail?"

"Some of us call it Nature: but others call it God," said I.

"Search me! I don't know what It is—but I do know there's got to be Something behind these things, anyhow," said he, and turned the chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully. He had used Westmoreland's words, once applied to his own case! "Oh, yes, there's Something, because I've watched It working with grubs, getting 'em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored butterflies, Something that's got the time and the patience and the know-how to build wings as well as worlds." He laid the little inanimate mystery aside.

"It's come to the point, parson, where I've just got to know more. I know enough now to know how much I don't know, because I've got a peep at how much there is to know. There's a God's plenty to find out, and it's up to me to go out and find it."

"Some of the best and brightest among men have given all the years of their lives to just that finding out and knowing more—and they found their years too few and short for the work. But such help as you need and we can get, you shall have, please God!" said I.

"I'm ready for the word to start, chief." And heaven knows he was.

His passion transformed him; he forgot himself; took his mind off himself and his affairs and grievances and hatreds and fears; and thus had chance to expand and to grow, in those following years of patientest effort, of untiring research and observance, of lovingest study. Days in the open woods and fields burned his pale skin a good mahogany, and stamped upon it the windswept freshness of out of doors. The hunted and suspicious glance faded from his eyes, which took on more and more the student's absorbed intensity; the mouth lost its sinister straightness; and while it retained an uncompromising firmness, it learned how to smile. He was a familiar figure, tramping from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary Virginia's command literally. He looked upon John Flint as his special charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow. I am sure that if we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general alarm, and gone to hunt for his body. And to have seen John Flint without Kerry would have called forth condolences.

Sometimes—when I had time—I went with him moth-hunting at night; and never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the stars!

We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a benediction. Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the frogs' canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures of the dark. We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses and sleeping flowers. We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed themselves only in the holy dark.

For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the Moon. And oh, the moths! Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io, with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow over which we gloated.

How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the trees upon which the feast had been spread! The big yellow-banded sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a moment, and then was off again as swift as thought. The light drew the great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with white. The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment revealed them, seemed to make their colors alive; for they show no such glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales, and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.

Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink. No haul he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.

My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for. I had wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided. It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might have gotten in an hour's evil effort. And it represented no small achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune—you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp to distinguish him. The use of the stick he thought best to carry became perfunctory. I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his master had forgotten all about it.

Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed, scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of being a professional man—say a pleasantly homely and scholarly college professor. There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I knew very much more about Mr. Flint's past than I would tell—which was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another prodigal; and that aware of this I had kept him with me until he found himself again.

So when folks met him and Kerry they smiled and spoke, for we are friendly people and send no man to Coventry without great cause. And there wasn't a child, black or white, who didn't know and like the man with the butterfly net.

The country people for miles around knew and loved him, too; for he walked up and down the earth and went to and fro in it, full of curious and valuable knowledge shared freely as the need arose. He would glance at your flower-garden, for instance, and tell you what insect visitors your flowers had, and what you should do to check their ravages. He'd walk about your out-buildings and commend white-wash, and talk about insecticides; and you'd learn that bees are partial to blue, but flies are not; and that mosquitoes seem to dislike certain shades of yellow. And then he'd leave you to digest it.

He was a quiet evangelist, a forerunner of that Grand Army which will some day arise, not to murder and maim men, but to conquer man's deadliest foe and greatest economic menace—the injurious insect.

It was he who spread the tidings of Corn and Poultry and Live Stock Clubs, stopping by many a lonely farm to whisper a word in the ears of discouraged boys, or to drop a hint to unenlightened fathers and mothers.

He carried about in his pockets those invaluable reports and bulletins which the government issues for the benefit and enlightenment of farmers; and these were left, with a word of praise, where they would do the most good.

Those same bulletins from the Bureau of Entomology had planted in John Flint's heart the seed which bore such fruit of good citizenship. The whole course of his early years had tended to make him suspicious of government, which spelt for him police and prison, the whole grim machinery which threatened him and which he in turn threatened. He had feared and hated it; it caught men and shut them up and broke them. If he ever asked himself, "What can my government do for me?" he had to answer: "It can put me in prison and keep me there; it can even send me to the Chair." Wherefore government was a thing to hate, to injure—and to escape from.

The first thing he had ever found worthy of respect and admiration in this same government was one of its bulletins.

"Where'd you get this?"

"I asked for it, and the Bureau sent it."

"Oh! You've got a friend there!"

"No. The bulletins are free to any one interested enough to ask for them."

"You mean to say the government gets up things like this—pays men to find out and write 'em up—pays to have 'em printed—and then gives 'em away to anybody? Why, they're valuable!"

"Yes; but they are nevertheless quite free. I have a number, if you'd like to go over them. Or you can send for new ones."

"But why do they do it? Where's the graft?" he wondered.

"The graft in this case is common sense in operation. If farms can be run with less labor and loss and more profit and pleasure, why, the whole country is benefited, isn't it? Don't you understand, the government is trying to help those who need help, and therefore is willing to lend them the brains of its trained and picked experts? It isn't selfish thwart that aim, is it?"

He said nothing. But he read and re-read the bulletins I had, and sent for more, which came to him promptly. They didn't know him, at the Bureau; they asked him no questions; he wasn't going to pay anybody so much as a penny. They assumed that the man who asked for advice and information was entitled to all they could reasonably give him, and they gave it as a matter of course. That is how and why he found himself in touch with his Uncle Sam, a source hitherto disliked and distrusted. This source was glad to put its trained intelligence at his service and the only reward it looked to was his increased capacity to succeed in his work! He simply couldn't dislike or distrust that which benefited him; and as his admiration and respect for the Department of Agriculture grew, unconsciously his respect and admiration for the great government behind it grew likewise. After all, it was his government which was reaching across intervening miles, conveying information, giving expert instruction, telling him things he wanted to know and encouraging him to go right on and find out more for himself!

Now if he had asked himself what his government could do for him, he had to answer: "It can help me to make good."

And he began to understand that this was possible because he obeyed the law, and that only in intelligent obedience and co-operation is there any true freedom. The law no longer meant skulking by day and terror by night; it was protection and peace, and a chance to work in the open, and the sympathy and understanding and comradeship of decent folks. The government was no longer a brute force which arbitrarily popped men into prison; it was the common will of a free people, just as the law was the common conscience.

I dare not say that he learned all this easily, or all at once, or even willingly. None of us learns our great lessons easily. We have to live them, breathe them, work them out with sweat and tears. That we do learn them, even inadequately, makes the glory and the wonder of man.

And so John Flint went to school to the government of the United States, and carried its little text-books about with him and taught them to others in even more need that he; and heckled hopeless boys into Corn Clubs; and coaxed sullen mothers and dissatisfied girls into Poultry and Tomato Clubs; and was full of homely advice upon such living subjects as the spraying of fruit trees, and how to save them from blight and scale-insects, and how to get rid of flies, and cut-worms, and to fight the cattle-tick, which is our curse; and the preservation of birds, concerning which he was rabid. His liking for birds began with Miss Sally Ruth's pigeons and the friendly birds in our garden. And as he learned to know them his love for them grew. I have seen him daily visit a wren's nest without once alarming the little black-eyed mother. I have heard him give the red-bird's call, and heard that loveliest of all birds answer him. And I have seen the impudent jays, within reach of his hand, swear at him unabashed and unafraid, because he fed a vireo first.

I like to think of his intimate friendship with the wholesome country children—not the least of his blessings. He was their chief visitor from the outside world. He knew wonderful secrets about things one hadn't noticed before, and he could make miracles with his quick strong fingers. He'd sit down, his stick and knapsack beside him, his glamorous dog at his feet, and while you and your sisters and brothers and friends and neighbors hung about him like a cluster of tow-headed bees, he'd turn a few sticks and bits of cloth and twine and a tack or two, and an old roller-skate wheel he took out of his pocket, into an air-ship! He could go down by your little creek and make you a water-wheel, or a windmill. He could make you marvelous little men, funny little women, absurd animals, out of corks or peanuts. He knew, too, just exactly the sort of knife your boy-heart ached for—and at parting you found that very knife slipped into your enraptured palm. You might save the pennies you earned by picking berries and gathering nuts, but you could never, never find at any store any candy that tasted like the sticks that came out of his pockets, and you needn't hope to try. He had the inviolable secret of that candy, and he imparted to it a divine flavor no other candy ever possessed. If you were a little doll-less girl, he didn't leave you with the provoking promise that Santa Claus would bring you one if you were good. He was so sure you were good that he made you right then and there a wonderful doll out of corn-husks, with shredded hair, and a frock of his own handkerchief. When he came again you got another doll—a store doll; but I think your child-heart clung to the corn-baby with the handkerchief dress. I have often wondered how many little cheeks snuggled against John Flint's home-made dollies, how many innocent breasts cradled them; how many a little fellow carried his knife to bed with him, afraid to let it get out of reach of a hard little hand, because he might wake up in the morning and find he had only dreamed it! No, I hardly think the country children were the least of John Flint's blessings. They would run to meet him, hold on to his hands, drag him here and there to show him what wonders their sharp eyes had discovered since his last visit; and give him, with shining eyes, such cocoons and caterpillars, and insects as they had found for him. It was they who called him the Butterfly Man, a name which spread over the whole country-side. If you had asked for John Flint, folks would have stared. And if you described him—a tall man in a Norfolk suit, with a red beard and a red dog, and an insect case:

"Oh, you mean the Butterfly Man! Sure. You'll find him about somewhere with the kids." If there was anything he couldn't have, in that county, it was because folks hadn't it to give if he should ask.

At home his passion for work at times terrified me. When I protested:

"I was twenty-five years old when I landed here," he reminded me. "So I've got twenty-five years' back-work to catch up with."

He had taken over a correspondence that had since become voluminous, and which included more and more names that stood for very much. Sometimes when I read aloud a passage from a letter that praised him, he turned red, and writhed like a little boy whose ears are being relentlessly washed by his elders.

By this time he had learned to really classify; heavens, how unerringly he could place an insect in its proper niche! It was a sort of sixth sense with him. That cold, clear, incisive power of brain which on a time had made Slippy McGee the greatest cracksman in America, was, trained and disciplined in a better cause, to make John Flint in later years an international authority upon lepidoptera, an observer to whom other observers deferred, a naturalist whose dictum settled disputed points. And I knew it, I foresaw it!

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I grew as vain over his enlarging powers as if I had been the Mover of the Game, not a pawn. I felt, gloriously, that I had not lived for nothing. A great naturalist is not born every day, no, nor every year, nor even every century. And I had caught me a great burglar and I had hatched me a great naturalist! My Latin soul was enraptured with this ironic anomaly. I could not choose but love the man for that.

I really had some cause for vanity. Others than myself had been gradually drawn to the unassuming Butterfly Man. Westmoreland loved him. A sympathetic listener who seldom contradicted, but often shrewdly suggested, Flint somehow knew how to bring out the big doctor's best; and in consequence found himself in contact with a mind above all meanness and a nature as big and clean as a spray-swept beach.

"Oh, my, my, my, what a surgeon gone to waste!" Westmoreland would lament, watching the long, sure fingers at work. "Well, I suppose it's all for the best that Father De Rance beat me to you—at least you've done less damage learning your trade." So absorbed would he become that he sometimes forget cross patients who were possibly fuming themselves into a fever over his delay.

Eustis, who had met the Butterfly Man on the country roads and had stopped his horse for an informal chat, would thereafter go out of his way for a talk with him. These two reticent men liked each other immensely. At opposite poles, absolutely dissimilar, they yet had odd similarities and meeting-points. Eustis was nothing if not practical; he was never too busy to forget to be kind. Books and pamphlets that neither Flint nor I could have hoped to possess found their way to us through him. Scientific periodicals and the better magazines came regularly to John Flint's address. That was Eustis's way. This friendship put the finishing touch upon the Butterfly Man's repute. He was my associate, and my mother was devoted to him. Miss Sally Ruth, whose pet pear-tree he had saved and whose pigeons he had cured, approved of him, too, and said so with her usual openness. Westmoreland was known to be his firm friend; nobody could forget the incident of those butterflies in the doctor's hat! Major Cartwright liked him so much that he even bore with the dogs, though Pitache in particular must have sorely strained his patience. Pitache cherished the notion that it was his duty to pass upon all visitors to the Butterfly Man's rooms. For some reason, known only to himself, the little dog also cherished a deep-seated grudge against the major, the very sound of whose voice outside the door was enough to send him howling under the table, where he lay with his head on his paws, a wary eye cocked balefully, and his snarls punctuating the Major's remarks.

"He smells my Unitarian soul, confound him!" said the major. "An' he's so orthodox he thinks he'll get chucked out of dog-heaven, if he doesn't show his disapproval."

The little dog did finally learn to accept the major's presence without outward protest; though the major declared that Pitache always hung down his tail when he came and hung it up when he left!

The Butterfly Man accepted whatever friendliness was proffered without diffidence, but with no change in his natural reserve. You could tell him anything: he listened, made few comments and gave no advice, was absolutely non-shockable, and never repeated what he heard. The unaffected simplicity of his manner delighted my mother. She said you couldn't tell her—there was good blood in that man, and he had been more than any mere tramp before he fell into our hands! Why, just observe his manner, if you please! It was the same to everybody; he had, one might think, no sense whatever of caste, creed, age, sex, or color; and yet he neither gave offense nor received it.

Those outbursts which had so terrified me at first came at rare and rarer intervals. If I were to live for a thousands years I should never be able to forget the last and worst; which fell upon him suddenly and without warning, on a fine morning while he sat on the steps of his verandah, and I beside him with my Book of Hours in my hand. In between the Latin prayers I sensed pleasantly the light wind that rustled the vines, and how the Mayne bees went grumbling from flower to flower, and how one single bird was singing to himself over and over the self-same song, as if he loved it; and how the sunlight fell in a great square, like a golden carpet, in front of the steps. It was all very still and peaceful. I was just turning a page, when John Flint jerked his pipe out of his mouth, swung his arm back, and hurled the pipe as far as he could. I watched it, involuntarily, and saw where it fell among our blue hydrangeas; from which a thin spiral of smoke arose lazily in the calm air. But Flint shoved his hat back on his head, sat up stiffly, and swore.