tailor, and old Louis Trudel will not forget you. It shall be as you
said this morning--it is no day for work. We will play, and the clothes
for the Manor can go to the devil. Smoke of hell-fire, I will go and
have a pipe with that, poor wretch the Notary!"

So, a wonderful thing happened. Louis Trudel, on a week-day and a
market-day, went to smoke a pipe with Narcisse Dauphin, and to tell him
that M. Mallard was going to stay with him for ever, at fine wages. He
also announced that he had paid this whole week's wages in advance; but
he did not tell what he did not know--that half the money had already
been given to old Margot, whose son lay ill at home with a broken leg,
and whose children were living on bread and water. Charley had slowly
drawn from the woman the story of her life as he sat by the kitchen fire
and talked to her, while her master was talking to the Notary.

CHAPTER XVII. THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY

Since the day Charley had brought home the paper bought at the
post-office, and water-marked Kathleen, he had, at odd times, written
down his thoughts, and promptly torn the paper up again or put it in the
fire. In the repression of the new life, in which he must live wholly
alone, so far as all past habits of mind were concerned, it was a relief
to record his passing reflections, as he had been wont to do when the
necessity for it was less. Writing them here was like the bursting of
an imprisoned stream; it was relaxing the ceaseless eye of vigilance;
freeing an imprisoned personality. This personality was not yet
merged into that which must take its place, must express itself in the
involuntary acts which tell of a habit of mind and body--no longer the
imitative and the histrionic, but the inherent and the real.

On the afternoon of the day that old Louis agreed to give him wages,
and went to smoke a pipe with the Notary, Charley scribbled down his
thoughts on this matter of personality and habit.

"Who knows," he wrote, "which is the real self? A child comes into the
world gin-begotten, with the instinct for liquor in his brain, like the
scent of the fox in the nostrils of the hound. And that seems the real.
But the same child caught up on the hands of chance is carried into
another atmosphere, is cared for by ginhating minds and hearts: habit
fastens on him--fair, decent, and temperate habit--and he grows up like
the Cure yonder, a brother of Aaron. Which is the real? Is the instinct
for