boys and
girls of our acquaintance go to him with their troubles. Ye'll see him
with a murder case to try before long, as sure as ye're not worth yer
salt! But I expect ye can still call him by his name of Joe, all the
same!"

It was a bleak and meagre little office into which Mr. Fear ushered
himself to offer his amends. The cracked plaster of the walls was bare
(save for dust); there were no shelves; the fat brown volumes, most of
them fairly new, were piled in regular columns upon a cheap pine table;
there was but one window, small-paned and shadeless; an inner door of
this sad chamber stood half ajar, permitting the visitor unreserved
acquaintance with the domestic economy of the tenant; for it disclosed
a second room, smaller than the office, and dependent upon the window
of the latter for air and light. Behind a canvas camp-cot, dimly
visible in the obscurity of the inner apartment, stood a small
gas-stove, surmounted by a stew-pan, from which projected the handle of
a big tin spoon, so that it needed no ghost from the dead to whisper
that Joseph Louden, attorney-at-law, did his own cooking. Indeed, he
looked it!

Upon the threshold of the second room reposed a small, worn,
light-brown scrub-brush of a dog, so cosmopolitan in ancestry that his
species was almost as undeterminable as the cast-iron dogs of the Pike
Mansion. He greeted Mr. Fear hospitably, having been so lately an
offcast of the streets himself that his adoption had taught him to lose
only his old tremors, not his hopefulness. At the same time Joe rose
quickly from the deal table, where he had been working with one hand in
his hair, the other splattering ink from a bad pen.

"Good for you, Happy!" he cried, cheerfully. "I hoped you'd come to see
me to-day. I've been thinking about a job for you."

"What kind of a job?" asked the visitor, as they shook hands. "I need
one bad enough, but you know there ain't nobody in Canaan would gimme
one, Joe."

Joe pushed him into one of the two chairs which completed the furniture
of his office. "Yes, there is. I've got an idea--"

"First," broke in Mr. Fear, fingering his shapeless hat and fixing his
eyes upon it with embarrassment,--"first lemme say what I come here to
say. I--well--" His embarrassment increased and he paused, rubbing the
hat between his hands.

"About this job," Joe began. "We can fix it so--"

"No," said Happy. "You lemme go on. I didn't mean fer to cause you no
troubl