to be near clean, good people once more. Inadvertently, he
took a seat by his step-mother, who rose with a slight rustle of silk
and moved to another pew; and it happened, additionally, that this was
the morning that the minister, fired by the Tocsin's warnings, had
chosen to preach on the subject of Joe himself.

The outcast returned to his own kind. No lady spoke to him upon the
street. Mamie Pike had passed him with averted eyes since her first
meeting with him, but the shunning and snubbing of a young man by a
pretty girl have never yet, if done in a certain way, prevented him
from continuing to be in love with her. Mamie did it in the certain
way. Joe did not wince, therefore it hurt all the more, for blows from
which one cringes lose much of their force.

The town dog had been given a bad name, painted solid black from head
to heel. He was a storm centre of scandal; the entrance to his dingy
stairway was in square view of the "National House," and the result is
imaginable. How many of Joe's clients, especially those sorriest of
the velvet gowns, were conjectured to ascend his stairs for reasons
more convivial than legal! Yes, he lived with his own kind, and, so
far as the rest of Canaan was concerned, might as well have worn the
scarlet letter on his breast or branded on his forehead.

When he went about the streets he was made to feel his condition by the
elaborate avoidance, yet furtive attention, of every respectable person
he met; and when he came home to his small rooms and shut the door
behind him, he was as one who has been hissed and shamed in public and
runs to bury his hot face in his pillow. He petted his mongrel
extravagantly (well he might!), and would sit with him in his rooms at
night, holding long converse with him, the two alone together. The dog
was not his only confidant. There came to be another, a more and more
frequent partner to their conversations, at last a familiar spirit.
This third came from a brown jug which Joe kept on a shelf in his
bedroom, a vessel too frequently replenished. When the day's work was
done he shut himself up, drank alone and drank hard. Sometimes when the
jug ran low and the night was late he would go out for a walk with his
dog, and would awake in his room the next morning not remembering where
he had gone or how he had come home. Once, after such a lapse of
memory, he woke amazed to find himself at Beaver Beach, whither, he
learned from the red-bearded