hey
locked you up, you know. When that is done you can commence right there
if you choose; I wish you would. Give the public--sell would be better,
but it will hardly buy--a prison system less atrocious, less destructive
of justice, and less promotive of crime and vice, than the one it has.
By-the-by, I suppose you know that Raphael Ristofalo went to prison last
night again?"

Richling sprang to his feet. "For what? He hasn't"--

"Yes, sir; he has discovered the man who robbed him, and has killed
him."

Richling started away, but halted as the Doctor spoke again, rising from
his seat and shaking out his legs.

"He's not suffering any hardship. He's shrewd, you know,--has made
arrangements with the keeper by which he secures very comfortable
quarters. The star-chamber, I think they call the room he is in. He'll
suffer very little restraint. Good-day!"

He turned, as Richling left, to get his own hat and gloves. "Yes," he
thought, as he passed slowly downstairs to his carriage, "I have erred."
He was not only teaching, he was learning. To fight evil was not enough.
People who wanted help for orphans did not come to him--they sent. They
drew back from him as a child shrinks from a soldier. Even Alice, his
buried Alice, had wept with delight when he gave her a smile, and
trembled with fear at his frown. To fight evil is not enough. Everybody
seemed to feel as though that were a war against himself. Oh for some
one always to understand--never to fear--the frowning good intention of
the lonely man!

CHAPTER XXXIX.

"PETTENT PRATE."

It was about the time, in January, when clerks and correspondents were
beginning to write '59 without first getting it '58, that Dr. Sevier, as
one morning he approached his office, noticed with some grim amusement,
standing among the brokers and speculators of Carondelet street, the
baker, Reisen. He was earnestly conversing with and bending over a
small, alert fellow, in a rakish beaver and very smart coat, with the
blue flowers of modesty bunched saucily in one button-hole.

Almost at the same moment Reisen saw the Doctor. He called his name
aloud, and for all his ungainly bulk would have run directly to the
carriage in the middle of the street, only that the Doctor made believe
not to see, and in a moment was out of reach. But when, two or three
hours later, the same vehicle came, tipping somewhat sidewise against
the sidewalk at the Charity Hospital gate, and the Doctor st