he was singled out as the vessel into which the man might empty
the vials of his wrath without fear of reprisals. Curses, not
loud--since a generation of travellers has arisen to whom profanity,
however picturesque, is objectionable--but deep and corrosive; contumely
and abuse; tongue-lashings that stung like the flick of a whip; and now
and then, at a night landing when there were no upper-deck people
looking on to be shocked, blows. All these slave-drivings, or at least
his share of them, Griswold endured as became a man who had voluntarily
put himself in the way of them. But they were hardening. Griswold fought
manfully against the brutalizing effect of them, but with only partial
success. Because of them, he was sure that his theories in the
compassionate warp and woof of them must always afterward be shot
through with flame-colored threads of fiery resentment reaching back
through M'Grath to every master who wielded the whip of power; the power
of the man who has, over the man who has not.

In such a lurid light it was only natural that the ethical perspective
should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the
justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things
should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy
to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and
lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From
theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to
robbing a bank is a broad step, and given an opportunity to reflect upon
it calmly after the fact, even such an imaginative enthusiast as
Griswold might have reconsidered. But the hasty plunge into the
underdepth of roustabout life was like the brine bath of the blacksmith
to heated steel; it served to temper him afresh.

Fortunately he was not altogether unequal to the physical test, severe
as it was. With all of his later privations, he had lived a clean life;
and his college training in athletics stood him in good stead.
Physically, as intellectually, the material in him was of the
fine-grained fibre in which quality counts for more than quantity.
Lacking something in mass, the lack was more than compensated by the
alertness and endurance which had made him at once the best man with the
foils and the safest oar in the boat in his college days. None the less,
the first night out of New Orleans, with its uncounted plantation
landings, had tried him k