ge of safety, even when she
took the perilous place of maid in the crude hotel with its bar-room
annex, whither the hand of Fate had brought her, an Irish immigrant, to
find a new life in the little town of Links. Kitty was Cause Number Two.

Jimmy did not chance to cross on the same ship. But the time had come;
and by chance, which is not chance at all, he drifted into the same
corner of Canada, and had not half a day to wait before he was snapped
up by a local farmer seeking for just such a build of man to swing the
axe and scythe upon his farm.

Farm life is dreary enough, at least it was in those days. It was hard
work from dawn to dusk, and even then the feeble, friendly glimmer of a
caged candle was invoked to win an extra hour or two of labour from the
idleness of gloom--hours for the most part devoted to the chores. The
custom of the day gave all the hired ones freedom Saturday night and all
day Sunday. Wages were high, and with one broad epidemic impulse all
these thriving hirelings walked, drove, or rode on Saturday night to the
little town of Links. Man is above all a social animal; only the
diseased ones seek solitude. Where, then, could they meet their kind?

The instinct which has led to the building of a million clubs, could
find no local focus but the bar-room. John Downey's "hotel" was the
social centre of the great majority of the men who lived and moved
around the town of Links. Not the drink itself, but the desire of men to
meet with men, to talk and swap the news or bandy mannish jokes, was the
attracting force. But the drink was there on tap and all the
ill-adjusted machinery of our modern ways operated to lead men on, to
make abstainers drink, to make the moderate, drunken.

If the life in Downey's stable, house, and bar were expanded in many
chapters, the reader would find a pile of worthless rubbish, mixed with
filth, but also here and there a thread of gold, a rod of the finest
steel, and even precious jewels. But this is not a history of the public
house. Downey's enters our list merely as Cause Number Three.

Those who study psychological causation say that one must find four
causes, accounting for place, matter, force, and time. The three already
given are well known, and I can only guess at the fourth, that referring
to the time. If we suppose that a sea pirate of a thousand years ago,
was permitted to return to earth, to prove that he had learned the
lessons of gentleness so foreign to