r minds to carry John to the barn
and stow him away in the hay mow but it had turned uncomfortably cool
and this plan was abandoned. Alfred opened the door leading to the
stairs, partly pulling and pushing him upstairs. He landed John in the
room, where he fell over on the bed.

John muttered and mumbled, flapping and flinging his arms wildly about
his head--he arose to a sitting posture. Alfred endeavored to lay him
down. His face and head were covered with cold perspiration. Alfred knew
the symptoms of the distressing effects that follow the circulation of a
tin cup. He hustled John out of bed. John floundered away from him in
the darkness, and found his way into an unused room. Alfred could hear
him but could not locate him. Groping his way in the darkness Alfred
kept calling in a muffled voice: "John, John, John, where are you? Come
to me."

Just then the house seemed to shake from roof to cellar as John and his
two hundred pounds fell over Uncle Jake's home-made sausage stuffer. The
stuffer was ten feet long. Stuffer and John carried a big rocking chair,
a tin boiler and several other reverberating pieces of household junk
with them.

Ere Alfred could rescue John from the mass of ruins under and on which
he was piled, John began to realize how difficult it is to retain what
you have no matter how strongly you desire to do so. Alfred had to get
out of hearing of John's sufferings to suppress his feeling. He felt
very deeply for John from the very bottom of his stomach; in fact, the
bottom of his stomach seemed disposed to come up. He endeavored to
divert his thoughts but they went back to a tin cup, a wheel-barrow,
cow's ears and other things.

Uncle Jake came out of his room. "What's the matter, what's up? You boys
trying to tear down the house? What's the trouble anyway?"

"Oh, John's drunk too much syrup and it's made him deathly sick," Alfred
began to explain. Uncle Jake interrupted him, saying, as he backed into
the room and closed the door: "Oh, I thought Sammy Steele's mule had
kicked some of you."

The wings of fame fly slowly, reputation travels faster. It is said that
remorse is the echo of a lost virtue. Alfred felt that remorse of
conscience that can come only to one who has fallen and lived on in the
happy illusions that no one heard him drop.

Governor Tener, Doctor Van Voorhis, Mr. Daly and others of John's
friends will no doubt be surprised at this leaf in his life. In all the
years that Joh