buttons out of the pop-shop
just now," cried another; "and he'll hold his head so high that he won't
look at us wicked sinners."

A third came up to him with a mock serious air, and eyeing him with his
head on one side, said,--

"They call you Thomas, I reckon. Ah, well, now you're going to be one
of Ned's childer, we must take you to the parson and get him to christen
you Jonadab."

Poor Johnson! he started up, for one moment he meditated a fierce rush
at his persecutors, the next, he turned round, darted from the public-
house, and hurried away he knew not whither.

And what will he do? Poor man--wretched, degraded drunkard as he had
been--he was by natural character a man of remarkable energy and
decision; what he had fairly and fully determined upon, his resolution
grasped like a vice. Brought up in constant contact with drunkenness
from his earliest years, and having imbibed a taste for strong drink
from his childhood, that taste had grown with his growth, and he had
never cared to summon resolution or seek strength to break through his
miserable and debasing habit. Married to a woman who rather rejoiced to
see her husband moderately intoxicated, because it made him good-
natured, he had found nothing in his home, except its growing misery, to
induce him to tread a better path. True, he could not but be aware of
the wretchedness which his sin and that of his wife had brought upon him
and his; yet, hitherto, he had never seen _himself_ to be the chief
cause of all this unhappiness. He blamed his work, he blamed his
thirst, he blamed his wife, he blamed his children, he blamed his dreary
comfortless home--every one, everything but himself. But now light had
begun to dawn upon him, though as yet it had struggled in only through a
few chinks. God had made a partial entrance for it through his remorse
at the loss of his son; that entrance had been widened by his visit to
Ned Brierley, yet he was still in much darkness; his light showed him
evil and sin in great mis-shapen terrible masses, but was not so far
sufficiently bright to let him see anything in clear sharp outline. A
great resolve was growing, but it needed more hammering into form, it
wanted more prayer to bring it up to the measure of a Christian duty.

And here we must leave him for the present, and pass to other and very
different scenes and characters essential to the development of our
story.

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