was
caught around her feet. For an instant she was passive, and, as it
seemed, saved. But the next moment her dominant instinct returned, and
with one stroke of her powerful heel she snapped the rope in twain and
so drifted with her mistress to the sea.

ROGER CATRON'S FRIEND

I think that, from the beginning, we all knew how it would end. He had
always been so quiet and conventional, although by nature an impulsive
man; always so temperate and abstemious, although a man with a quick
appreciation of pleasure; always so cautious and practical, although an
imaginative man, that when, at last, one by one he loosed these bands,
and gave himself up to a life, perhaps not worse than other lives which
the world has accepted as the natural expression of their various
owners, we at once decided that the case was a hopeless one. And when
one night we picked him up out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and
weather-worn drunkard, a hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift,
and a half-conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come.
The wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had
misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her
reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used and
abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even amusement, and
clearly there was nothing left to do but to hand him over to the state,
and we took him to the nearest penitential asylum. Conscious of the
Samaritan deed, we went back to our respective wives, and told his
story. It is only just to say that these sympathetic creatures were
more interested in the philanthropy of their respective husbands than
in its miserable object. "It was good and kind in you, dear," said
loving Mrs. Maston to her spouse, as returning home that night he flung
his coat on a chair with an air of fatigued righteousness; "it was like
your kind heart to care for that beast; but after he left that good
wife of his--that perfect saint--to take up with that awful woman, I
think I'd have left him to die in the ditch. Only to think of it,
dear, a woman that you wouldn't speak to!" Here Mr. Maston coughed
slightly, colored a little, mumbled something about "women not
understanding some things," "that men were men," etc., and then went
comfortably to sleep, leaving the outcast, happily oblivious of all
things, and especially this criticism, locked up in Hangtown Jail.

For the next twelve hours he lay ther