tree of life is blooming,
There is rest for you!"

What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
tie, this "hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye," as
Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and
blue-shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred
song with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that
did its work in spite of all prejudice? It was as if he were counsel in
one of those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at
first arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating
their intelligences. Whenever he had done this he had been drinking
hard, was in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in
which his brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful.
Was it the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural
as when under this influence? That then and only then the real man
spoke, that then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it
supplied the thing left out of him at birth?

"There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you!"

One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
the refrain:

"There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you!"

Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted

"There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you!"

Rouge Gosselin, who had entered during the singing, now spoke up quickly
in French:

"A sermon now, M'sieu'!"

Charley took his monocle out of his eye and put it back again. Now each
man present seemed singled out for an attack by this little battery
of glass. He did not reply directly to Rouge Gosselin, but standing
perfectly still, with one hand resting on the counter at which Suzon
stood, he prepared to speak.

Suzon did not attempt to stop him now, but gazed at him in a sort
of awe. These men present were Catholics, and held religion in
superstitious respect, however far from practising its precepts. Many
of them had been profane and blasphemous in their time; may have sworn
"sacre bapteme!" one of the worst oaths of their race; but it ha