and
blinked, and licked his lips.

"That's all right, father, that's all right. If you say it's so, I
guess it's so. I'll take your word for it. If it's good enough for you
and Madame, there's got to be something in it, and it's sure good
enough for me. Look here: the little girl and young Mayne have got a
different brand from yours, haven't they?"

"Neither of them is of the Old Faith."

"Huh! Well, I tell you what you do: you just switch me in somewhere
between you and Madame and him and her. That'll give me a line on all
of you--and maybe it'll give all of you a line on me. See?"

I saw, but as through a glass darkly. So the matter rested. And I must
in all humility set down that I have never yet been able to get at
what John Flint really believes he believes.

CHAPTER VII

THE GOING OF SLIPPY MCGEE

Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but
with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral
reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the
Pacific, during the years' slow upward march had John Flint grown.

Nature had never meant him for a criminal. The evil conditions that
society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him
no opportunity to be right. Now even among butterflies there are
occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions. Give the grub
his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in
the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal butterfly. That
is the Law.

At a crucial phase in this man's career his true talisman--a gray
moth--had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his
rightful heritage.

I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him
brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio
Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in
the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump
upon it bears to the head of a young dog. Its chrysalis looks so much
like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it,
fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.

"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I
watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the
nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach
out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head
off, and bury itself alive in a coffin m