that?"

Jim colored.

"Very well, their taxes are paid for this year; let them use that money.
They will not suffer, except in their feelings, and that is where they
ought to suffer. Man, you would spoil all the work of the Lord by your
selfish tenderness toward sinners!"

"They aren't sinners."

"Yes, they are--spiritual sinners, the worst kind in the world. Now--"

"You don't mean for me to go now?"

"Yes, I do--now. If you don't go now you never will. Then, afterward, I
want you to go home and sit in your best parlor and smoke, and have all
your cats in there, too."

Jim gasped. "But, Edward! Mis' Adkins--"

"I don't care about Mrs. Adkins. She isn't as bad as the rest, but she
needs her little lesson, too."

"Edward, the way that poor woman works to keep the house nice--and she
don't like the smell of tobacco smoke."

"Never mind whether she likes it or not. You smoke."

"And she don't like cats."

"Never mind. Now you go."

Jim stood up. There was a curious change in his rosy, child-like face.
There was a species of quickening. He looked at once older and more
alert. His friend's words had charged him as with electricity. When he
went down the street he looked taller.

Amanda Bennet and Alma Beecher, sitting sewing at their street windows,
made this mistake.

"That isn't Uncle Jim," said Amanda. "That man is a head taller, but he
looks a little like him."

"It can't be Uncle Jim," agreed Alma. Then both started.

"It is Uncle Jim, and he is coming here," said Amanda.

Jim entered. Nobody except himself, his nieces, and Joe Beecher ever
knew exactly what happened, what was the aspect of the door-mat erected
to human life, of the worm turned to menace. It must have savored of
horror, as do all meek and downtrodden things when they gain, driven to
bay, the strength to do battle. It must have savored of the god-like,
when the man who had borne with patience, dignity, and sorrow for them
the stings of lesser things because they were lesser things, at last
arose and revealed himself superior, with a great height of the spirit,
with the power to crush.

When Jim stopped talking and went home, two pale, shocked faces of women
gazed after him from the windows. Joe Beecher was sobbing like a child.
Finally his wife turned her frightened face upon him, glad to have still
some one to intimidate.

"For goodness' sake, Joe Beecher, stop crying like a baby," said she,
but she spoke in a queer whisper,