"Certainly. Business before pleasure. Pump him all you can, and then
come in. You 'll find me at one of the tables on the farther side."
Perkins passed on.

"You won't go in, my young friend?" said the temperance man.

"What is it to you whether I go in or stay out?" asked Brent, in a tone
of assumed carelessness.

"I want to keep every man I kin from walkin' the path that I walked and
sufferin' as I suffer." He was seized with a fit of coughing. His face
was old and very thin, and his hands, even in that hot air, were blue as
with cold. "I wisht you 'd go to our meetin' to-night. We 've got a
powerful speaker there, that 'll show you the evils of drink better 'n I
kin."

"Where is this great meeting?" Brent tried to put a sneer into his
voice, but an unaccountable tremor ruined its effect.

He was duly directed to the hall. "I may come around," he said,
carelessly, and sauntered off, leaving the man coughing beside the door
of the beer-garden. "Given all of his life to the devil," he mused,
"drunk himself to death, and now seeking to steal into heaven by giving
away a few tracts in his last worthless moments." He had forgotten all
about Perkins.

He strolled about for a while, and then, actuated by curiosity, sought
out the hall where the meeting was being held. It was a rude place, in a
poor neighbourhood. The meeting-room was up two flights of dingy,
rickety stairs. Hither Brent found his way. His acquaintance of the
street was there before him and sitting far to the front among those
whom, by their position, the young man took to be the speakers of the
evening. The room was half full of the motleyest crew that it had ever
been his ill fortune to set eyes on. The flaring light of two lard-oil
torches brought out the peculiarities of the queer crowd in fantastic
prominence. There was everywhere an odour of work, but it did not hang
chiefly about the men. The women were mostly little weazen-faced
creatures, whom labour and ill treatment had rendered inexpressibly
hideous. The men were chiefly of the reformed. The bleared eyes and
bloated faces of some showed that their reformation must have been of
very recent occurrence, while a certain unsteadiness in the conduct of
others showed that with them the process had not taken place at all.

It was late, and a stuffy little man with a wheezy voice and a very red
nose was holding forth on the evils of intemperance, very much to his
own satisfaction evidently, and u