In fact, it would have taken a sharp eye to discover even the sin. A dozen men sat in wooden-bottomed chairs at rough tables. Two of them, in a corner, were shamelessly playing a game of checkers. Most of the others were smoking and listening to Daniel Stiles. Daniel was the only one to meet the just expectations of the temperance lecturers. A black bottle and a glass stood before him. But then they may have been but a part of his oratorical equipment. Certain it is that his tongue was suspiciously loosed thus early in the evening. "I was just telling 'em," said Daniel, with a generous sweep of his arm to include the newcomer in the circle of his favored auditors, "I was just telling 'em that I never took up a State paper with more uncertain feelings than I did this here message of the President on the fi-nances. You see, I didn't know but he might have gone all wrong on that subject. Many of our public men are just as mixed on it as they can be. I remember the time when I was not clear about it myself."

That you, Henry?"-Page 230.

The orator improved the moment of awed silence which followed this confession of sharing in human fallibility to throw back his gray shawl, settle his glasses more firmly on his nose, and resort thoughtfully to his favorite aid to eloquence.

"Yes, sir," he went on, with a reminiscent smack of the lips, "I read it from beginning to end, and I wouldn't open my mouth to say what I really thought of it till I got clear through. Of course, as you all know, he's my President. I voted for him, and I stumped for him, and I'll leave you to say what the vote in this district was. But for all that, if he wasn't sound on the fi-nances, I would be the last man to say he was. Well,

sir, as I say, I read that State paper carefully, very carefully, noticing all the points as they came along, and I tell you it is one of the President's ablest State papers."

The phrase, as Daniel fondly recurred to it, seemed somehow to give him the air of being himself a great functionary of State. He poured himself out another drink in an abstracted and meditative way.

"Now my memory goes back," he resumed, "to Van Buren's message on the independent treasury system. That was a very able State paper. The fact is, all our Presidents have written very able State papers."

The orator's judgment was growing so mellow and generous that no wonder it wakened hospitable instincts in his bosom.

"Have something?" he inquired, looking around with beaming impersonality. A slow and sheepish acquiescence became visible on several faces. The blacksmith boldly offered to take a lemonade. Ginger-ale and root-beer were the other deadly potations most in demand. Daniel, meanwhile, helped himself to another glass.

"You ain't taking anything, Henry," he observed.

"No," said Smedley, "I don't want anything."

"That's right, Henry," said Daniel, suddenly developing a tendency to weep. "That's right. Take warning by me. Think what I might have been, writing State papers myself, like as not. I'm a spared monument, that's what I am." He was getting his prayer-meeting and his saloon phrases slightly mixed. "Any young man who sees me," he said, wiping his glasses on the fringe of his shawl, "ought not to need any other warning not to set his feet in a path where he is sure to stumble. You're quite right not to do it, Henry.

"I guess he thinks one stumbler is enough crossing the stone bridge in the dark," said the blacksmith, elbowing his neighbor to bring home the point of the joke. "If Henry was to get unsteady on his feet, too, where'd the pair of 'em fetch up, I wonder."

But Daniel was now in too dissolved a state of mental and moral flux to heed

The young minister's breath came quick. It was partly because he had been walking at top speed, more from excitement at his unwonted surroundings. His face involuntarily wore an air of high defiance. He would challenge, in his own person, the flashing allurements of vice. Sinners would quail and shrink before him. But first he must not forget his immediate purpose.

"Henry Smedley," he said, "you are wanted at home. Your father has had a seizure. He is thought to be dying." Henry rose quickly.

66

Oh, I was afraid of this," he said, with more feeling than Salton had ex

Then

he wants to," he began, slowly. he broke sharply off. "I must go," he said, starting for the door. But a thought struck him. He stepped back to Daniel Stiles and said to him, in a low voice, "How about your getting home?"

"That's all right, Henry," quavered the lachrymose Daniel. "Never mind. me. Filial duty comes first, I've always said that. Yes, Mr. Salton, I know what you're thinking. I'm an awful warning, that's what I am, and if you want a text to preach a temperance sermon on, why just take me."

This was surely the reformer's opportunity. Place and occasion invited

words such as he felt he had it in him to speak-words of tense rebuke that would leave sin writhing in its own ugliness before him. Yet a paralysis seemed strangely to fall upon him. It was, though he did not know it, the paralysis of disillusionment. This was the first real saloon he had ever seen, and it squared ill with the conventional picture of it in his imagination. Tawdry and stupid and deadening it was, but where was the wild revelry, where the sodden figures done to stupefaction by drink, where the fierce thirst, the rage, the brawling, the mad rushing down the abyss? All the heroism he had felt in boldly entering, all the nerving himself to leave behind him a stinging message of indignation, seemed to have gone for naught. He said something about their wanting him to come back with Henry, and went away uncertain whether his going was the act of a coward or his coming that of an ignoramus.

"As nice a young preacher as I ever saw," was Daniel's friendly comment. “I must make a point of going to hear him preach old Smedley's funeral sermon. It ought to be an able one. Such a subject as he'll have! But it's nothing, no it's nothing whatever, to the one I'll furnish him some day, no one knows how soon. We can't any of us tell when our summons will come. But it will be a great occasion to improve when I go. I sometimes kind of wish I could improve it myself. I do not doubt I could make an able and edifying discourse. But so could he, or any preacher, for the matter of that, with such an awful warning to hold up."

Daniel Stiles seemed to lose himself in wonder at his own marked fitness for the purposes of reproof and instruction in righteousness, and emptied his bottle with the air of a man absolutely without a rival as a great object-lesson in morality.

III

No miracle intervened to perplex Mr. Smedley or relax the clutch on his heart. After that organ had given up the fight, Salton read to the family some of those audacities of hope and

triumph in death which the Bible is willing to let fall for years upon incredulous ears, for the sake of the one supreme moment, sure to come in all lives, when they will take their true place in the needs of mortal hearts and the nature of things.

When the young minister took his hat and said good-by, with the tremulousness of the great cries of faith still upon his lips, Henry Smedley, with an unaccustomed nervousness of manner, took his hat also, and said,

I'll walk down with you." "By no means. fectly, even in the dark. Besides, your mother, your sister

I know the road per

Mrs. Smedley looked up at her son with swift intentness. She marked his suppressed excitement. Why should he propose to go out at that time of night? Perhaps he had special reasons for wanting to be alone with the minister. Perhaps, perhaps, and her old heart bounded, his father's death-the suddenness of it--had at last touched him, perhaps her prayers were on the point of being answered!

"Don't mind us," she said, with a flash of decision. "Go with Mr. Salton, do. It may do you good-to get the air."

Henry Smedley had indeed special reasons, not for wanting to be alone with the minister, but for wanting to cross the stone bridge and pass Daniel Stiles's house. This began to be perceived even by Salton when, once there, Henry stopped short and exclaimed : "Why, he's not home yet! There's her light."

· Her light?" "Yes, Hannah's. She always sits up for him. But it must be nearly one o'clock! They can't have let him come alone."

He stepped forward to the gate and whistled sharply. The light came down stairs, into the hall, flared wildly out the opened door.

"That you, Henry?" Mr. Salton heard a voice say. "Why, where's father?"

Then he hasn't come?"
Why, no."

Without another word Henry turned and began walking back toward the

village. Not in the road, however; he chose the ditch, and walked gropingly. The wondering young minister followed him mechanically. Hannah came out as far as the gate, holding high the lamp.

From near the huge buttress of the bridge came a cry.

"He's here! He fell over here!"

Salton rushed for the sound, stumbling and bruising himself as he ran in the darkness. Finally he was able to make out a glint of gray shawl and a white head held on Henry's knee.

"Thank God he didn't fall into the water!" cried Salton.

'He might as well, I'm afraid," said Henry, excitedly. "Just see how he has cut himself! For all anyone knows he may have been here an hour. Oh, do you think he is killed? I can't see a sign of life myself. To think it was to end in this way!"

The two men carried the slight old form, limp and ghastly, into the house. Then Salton ran for the doctor. When he came back, it was to find a different Henry Smedley from the one he had left, from the one he thought he knew so well. The dogged reserve of the cold, inarticulate man, whom long misunderstanding had so hardened and silenced that even his mother could not guess the truth about his years of dumb and strange self-sacrifice, was swept away. With his face buried in his arms on the table, he was moaning and sobbing in that most appealing and piercing form of grief-a strong man suddenly broken.

"I did my best, Hannah! I promised you I would, and I did. Not one night missed, no matter what people said. And now, in spite of all, to have him go the way his father did before him, the way your uncle Zeph did, the way you said it killed you to think of! It's hard, it's hard! I thought I had enough to bear for one night before this."

"Don't take on so, Henry," said Hannah, awkwardly leaning forward to stroke his shoulder. Her eyes were on the minister, whom Henry had not heard come in. But a great light had dawned on that dweller in darkness. He came forward and seized Henry's hand impulsively, while the latter lifted