d
yet seen his patient succumb to. Instead, he went on talking in a tone
of confidence:

"I ought to have known enough to apply this remedy, because it's one
I've tried myself. If you could know, since the night you heard me
make a certain vow, what a time I've had with myself to keep it, you'd
understand that I know what it means to try to break up a habit.
Mine's the habit of years. With my temper and some of my associations,
intemperate profanity's been the easiest thing in the world to fall
into. When things went wrong, out would come the oaths like water out
of a spring--though that's a false comparison: like the filth out of a
sewer, I'd better say."

"We all swear more or less," acknowledged Chester, his head in his
hands.

"Not as I did--and you know it. I've been responsible for many a boy's
taking it up, though I didn't realize it. Because I was athletic and in
for sports with them, they thought I was the whole thing. They laughed
when I got mad and ripped out a lot of language: they copied it. But
I never heard myself as others hear me till that night I let go at the
mother who'd ignorantly murdered her boy by disobeying orders. On the
way home that night I woke up--came to myself--I don't know how. The
stars were unusually bright, and I looked up at them and thought of that
child's soul going back to its Maker.... and then thought of my curses
following it and coming to His ear."

A silence fell. When Burns broke it, it was in a voice deep with
feeling.

"The next words I sent up to that ear were in a different shape. I
think it was the first real prayer I'd ever said since the little parrot
prayers my mother taught me. That was the first: it hasn't been the
last. I don't suppose I say much that would sound like the preacher's
language, but Ches, what I do believe is that--I get what I ask for.
That's--help to fight my temptations. And profanity isn't the only one
nor the toughest one to down."

Chester looked up. For a moment he forgot himself and his wretchedness.
"It's hard to believe it's you, Red--talking like this."

"I know it must be hard, but it ought to be the more convincing on that
account. I belong to a profession of materialists, and all at once it's
grown to seem to me the strangest thing in life that a man who studies
the anatomy of this body of ours should be a materialist. To watch its
workings and then doubt the God who made it is sheet wilful blindness.
But, Ches--I've got my ey