ver that way. Then at the last moment I see the Good
Shepherd shooing the sleek old buck over where the goats are and
bringing the milk-thief back with him, and I see the look of surprise on
the old gentleman's face as he drops down the 'goat-chute.'"

CHAPTER SIXTEENTH

In time people grew tired of talking and reading about the strike, and
more than one man wished it might end. The strikers wished it too, for
hundreds of them were at the point of starvation. The police courts were
constantly crowded, and often overflowed and filled the morgue. Misery,
disappointment, want, and hunger made men commit crimes the very thought
of which would have caused them to shudder a year ago. One day a
desolate looking striker was warming his feet in a cheap saloon when a
well-dressed stranger came and sat near him and asked the cause of his
melancholia.

"I'm a striker," said the man; "and I have had no breakfast. More than
that, my wife is hungry at home and she is sick, too. She's been sick
ever since we buried the baby, three weeks ago. All day yesterday I
begged for work, but there was nothing for me to do. To-day I have
begged for money to buy medicine and food for her, but I have received
nothing, and now my only hope is that she may be dead when I go home
to-night, empty-handed and hungry."

The stranger drew his chair yet nearer to that of the miserable man and
asked in a low tone why he did not steal.

"I don't know how," said the striker, looking his questioner in the
face. "I have never stolen anything and I should be caught at my first
attempt. If not, it would only be a question of time, and if I must
become a thief to live we might as well all die and have done with it.
It'll be easier anyway after she's gone, and that won't be long; she
don't want to live. Away in the dead of night she wakes me praying for
death. And she used to be about the happiest woman in the world, and one
of the best, but when a mother sits and sees her baby starve and die, it
is apt to harden her heart against the people who have been the cause of
it all. I think she has almost ceased to care for me, for of course she
blames me for going out with the strikers, but how's a man to know what
to do? If I could raise the price I think I'd take a couple of doses of
poison home with me and put an end to our misery. She'd take it in a
holy minute."

"Don't do that," said the stranger, dabbing a silk handkerchief to his
eyes, one after the