glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales,
and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the
fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.

Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a
lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink. No haul
he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures
brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was
washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.

My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced
cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the
life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for. I had
wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently
restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided.
It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and
counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might
have gotten in an hour's evil effort. And it represented no small
achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the
feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed
to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune--you could not at
first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had
been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again
be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time,
although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he
grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp
to distinguish him. The use of the stick he thought best to carry
became perfunctory. I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his
master had forgotten all about it.

Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed,
scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red
beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of
being a professional man--say a pleasantly homely and scholarly
college professor. There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I
knew very much more about Mr. Flint's past than I would tell--which
was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better
days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a
scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into
a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another