l right, take my word for it. He'd ne'er
have taken his Sunday shoes if he'd meant to drown or hang himself; he
could have done it just as well in his clogs."

But Johnson could not be comforted.

"I must be going," he said. "I guess there'll be rare crying at our
house if Sammul's gone off for good; it'll drive Alice and our Betty
clean crazy."

With a sorrowful "good night" he stepped out again into the darkness,
and set his face homewards. He had not gone many paces when a sudden
thought seemed to strike him, and he turned out of the road by which he
had come, and crossing by a little foot-bridge a stream which ran at the
bottom of a high bank on his right hand, climbed up some steep ground on
the other side, and emerged into a field, from which a footpath led
along the border of several meadows into the upper part of Langhurst.
Here he paused and looked around him--the darkness had begun to yield to
the pale beams of the moon. His whole frame shook with emotion as he
stood gazing on the trees and shrubs around him; and no wonder, for
memory was now busy again, and brought up before him a life-like picture
of his strolls in springtime with his boy, when Samuel was but a tiny
lad. 'Twas in this very field, among these very trees, that he had
gathered bluebells for him, and had filled his little hands with their
lovely flowers. Oh, there was something more human in him then!
Drunkard he was, but not the wretched degraded creature into which
intemperance had kneaded and moulded him, till it left him now stiffened
into a walking vessel of clay, just living day by day to absorb strong
drink. Yet was he not even _now_ utterly hardened, for his tears fell
like rain upon that moonlit grass--thoughts of the past made his whole
being tremble. He thought of what his boy had been to him; he thought
of what he had been to his boy. He seemed to see his past life acted
out before him in a moving picture, and in all he saw himself a curse
and not a blessing--time, money, health, peace, character, soul, all
squandered. And still the picture moved on, and passed into the future:
he saw his utterly desolate home--no boy was there; he saw two empty
chairs--his Betty was gone, dead of want and a broken heart. The
picture still moved on: now he was quite alone, the whole hearth-stone
was his; he sat there very old and very grey, cold and hunger-bitten; a
little while, and a pauper's funeral passed from that hearth into the
s