town. Dogs, meeting one another for the
first time, decided in their knowing way that they were enemies, but
suddenly became allies in a yelping chase after one of their kind that
came down the street with a tin can tied to his tail.

I went at once to Conkwright's office and found him with his feet on a
table, contentedly smoking a cob pipe.

"I was just thinking over some points that I want to make," he remarked
as I entered.

"And I hope, sir, that you are in the proper humor to make them."

"Can't tell about that. Oratory is as stealthy and as illusive as a
weazel at night. You never know when he's coming."

"But do you feel well?" I anxiously inquired.

"Oh, feel first-rate, but that doesn't make any particular difference.
Sometimes a man may think that he feels well, but when he gets up to
speak he finds that he is simply sluggish. Reckon I'll get through all
right. Do the best I can, any way, and if I fail it can't be helped.
Guess we'd better go over."

An anxious day that was for me. I looked at Alf, now beginning to grow
pale under his imprisonment, and I saw his resentment rise and fall as
the state's attorney pictured him, waiting, listening with eagerness for
the sound of a horse's hoofs. I was to be a lawyer, to defend men and to
prosecute them for money, and yet I wondered how that bright young
fellow, with the seeming passion of an honest outcry, could stand there
and tell the jury that my friend had committed the foulest murder that
had ever reddened the criminal annals of his state. Old man Conkwright
sat, twirling his thumbs, and occasionally he would nod at the jurymen
as if to call their attention to a rank absurdity. But I did not see how
he could offset the evidence and the blazing sentences of that
impassioned prosecutor. At last Conkwright's time had come, and when he
arose and uttered his first word I felt the chill of a disappointment
creeping over me. He was slow and his utterance was as cold as if it had
issued from a frost-bitten mouth. I went out and walked round the town,
to the livery-stable, where a negro was humming a tune as he washed a
horse's back; to the drug-store, where a doctor was dressing a brick-bat
wound in a drunken man's scalp--I walked out to the edge of the town,
where the farming land lay, and then I turned back. I was thinking of my
return home, of the sorrow that I should take with me, of those old
people--of Guinea.

Some one called me, and facing about I r