d Growly abroad and Old Growly at home were two very different
people. Only the voice was the same. The homely, furrowed, wizened
face lighted up, and the keen, restless eyes lost their expression of
shrewdness, and the thin, bony hands that elsewhere clutched and
clutched and pinched and pinched for possession unlimbered themselves
in the presence of little Abel, and reached out their long fingers
yearningly and caressingly toward the little child. Then the hoarse
voice would growl a salutation that was full of tenderness, for it came
straight from the old man's heart; only, had you not known how much he
loved the child, you might have thought otherwise, for the old man's
voice was always hoarse and discordant, and that was why they called
him Old Growly. But what proved his love for that puny babe was the
fact that every afternoon, when he came home from the factory, Old
Growly brought his little boy a dime; and once, when the little fellow
had a fever on him from teething, Old Growly brought him a dollar!
Next day the tooth came through and the fever left him, but you could
not make the old man believe but what it was the dollar that did it
all. That was natural, perhaps; for his life had been spent in
grubbing for money, and he had not the soul to see that the best and
sweetest things in human life are not to be had by riches alone.

As the doctor had in one way and another intimated would be the case,
the child did not wax fat and vigorous. Although Old Growly did not
seem to see the truth, little Abel grew older only to become what the
doctor had foretold,--a cripple. A weakness of the spine was
developed, a malady that dwarfed the child's physical growth, giving to
his wee face a pinched, starved look, warping his emaciated body, and
enfeebling his puny limbs, while at the same time it quickened the
intellectual faculties to the degree of precocity. And so two and
three and four years went by, little Abel clinging to life with
pathetic heroism, and Old Growly loving that little cripple with all
the violence of his selfish nature. Never once did it occur to the
father that his child might die, that death's seal was already set upon
the misshapen little body; on the contrary, Old Growly's thoughts were
constantly of little Abel's famous future, of the great fortune he was
to fall heir to, of the prosperous business career he was to pursue, of
the influence he was to wield in the world,--of dollars, dollars,