my own." Here significant looks were gravely
exchanged. "They gave it to me by mistake when I reached the Pass. I
didn't care much at that time about names or anything else, so I let it
go. There are times in a fellow's life when he's not unwilling to forget
his name. My name is Boyle." And then, in sentences simple, clean-cut,
and terse, he told of his boyhood days, the Old Mill, the two boys
growing up together, their love for and their loyalty to each other,
their struggles and their success. Then came a pause. The speaker had
obviously come to a difficult spot in his story. The men waited in
earnest, grave, and deeply moved expectation. "At that time a great
calamity came to me--no matter what--and it threw me clear off my
balance. I lost my head and lost my nerve, and just then--" again the
speaker paused, as if to gather strength to continue--"and just then
my brother did me a wrong. Not being in a condition to judge fairly, I
magnified the wrong a thousand-fold and I tried to tear my brother out
of my heart. I could not and I would not forgive him, and I couldn't
cease to love him. I lived a life of misery, misery so great that it
drove me from everything in earth that I held dear, and for three years
I went steadily down from bad to worse. I came to the Crow's Nest a year
and a half ago. My life since then most of you know well."

"Bedad we do! An' Hivin bliss ye!" burst forth Tommy Tate, who had found
the greatest difficulty in controlling his emotions of indignation and
grief during the doctor's self-condemnatory tale. At Tommy's words a
quiet thrill ran through the crowd, for few men of those present
but held the doctor in affectionate esteem. The sins of which he
was conscious and which humiliated him before them were, in their
estimation, but trivial.

For a moment the speaker was thrown off his track by Tommy's outburst,
but, recovering himself, he went on. "It would be wrong to say that my
life here has been all bad. I have been able to serve many of you,
but my work has done far more for me than it has for you. But for it I
should have long ago gone down out of sight. I confess that it has been
a hard fight for me, an awful fight, to stay at my work, but the day
that I heard that my brother was your missionary brought me the hardest
fight I had had for many a day. I wanted to get away from the past. For
nearly four years I had been carrying round a heart with hell in it. I
had begun to forget a little,