faithless lover, this dishonorable parent,
had become accustomed to dull misery; but this fierce onslaught of an
avenging sense of personal unworthiness and dread of divine justice was
more than he could bear. Life had long since lost its charms and he had
more than once seriously contemplated suicide.

"There seems to be no use in trying to beat nature in any other way, and
so I will try the dernier resort," he said aloud. Opening his pocket
knife, he cut a piece of rope from the flagstaff, looked around, found a
heavy bar of iron, and fastened rope and weight together. In one end of
the rope he made a noose, slipped it over his neck, approached the
railing and leaned upon it to reflect. His mind now went back into the
still more remote past; he was a boy again, and at his mother's knee.
Half audibly and half unconsciously, he began murmuring, "Now I lay me
down to sleep, I pray--no--I'll be consistent," he added, with a sigh.
"I have lived without the mummery of prayer, and I will die without
it."

And then by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do
the most absurd things at the most sacred times--mourners laugh at
funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings--he
began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when
shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the Hudson river:

"One, two, three, the bumble bee,
The rooster crows and away she goes!"

The absurdity of so trivial a memory at such a serious moment excited
his sense of humor, and he smiled.

By this time the violence of his remorse had begun to subside and proved
to be only a fitful, fleeting protest of that abused and neglected moral
sense. Something more terrible than even this discovery of the wrong
done to his own son would have to come. There was plenty of time! Nature
was in no haste! This was only a warning, a little danger signal.

By a short, swift revulsion, his feelings changed from horror to
indifference. "After all, why should I care?" he said. "The boy is
nothing to me, and at any rate he would have gained his end in some
other way. Let him have his fling; I have had mine. If he didn't break
that old impostor's heart, he would probably break a better one! And as
for the gypsy--it's only a question of who and when. What a fool I have
made of myself! Who would believe that such a trifle could give me such
a shock? There is something to live for yet. I must see what sor