ssociation's
excursion and picnic, at which he was one of the twenty-five
vice-presidents. On this occasion Hefty had jumped overboard after one
of the Rag Gang whom the members of the Half-Hose Social Club had, in
a spirit of merriment, dropped over the side of the boat. This action
and the subsequent rescue and ensuing intoxication of the half-drowned
member of the Rag Gang had filled Miss Casey's heart with admiration,
and she told Hefty he was a good one and ought to be proud of himself.

On the following Sunday he walked out Avenue A to Tompkins Square with
Mary, and he also spent a great deal of time every day on her stoop
when he was not working, for he was working now and making ten dollars
a week as an assistant to an ice-driver. They had promised to give him
fifteen dollars a week and a seat on the box if he proved steady. He
had even dreamed of wedding Mary in the spring. But Casey was a
particularly objectionable man for a father-in-law, and his objections
to Hefty were equally strong. He honestly thought the young man no fit
match for his daughter, and would only promise to allow him to "keep
company" with Mary on the condition of his living steadily.

So it became Hefty's duty to behave himself. He found this a little
hard to do at first, but he confessed that it grew easier as he saw
more of Miss Casey. He attributed his reform to her entirely. She had
made the semi-political, semi-social organizations to which he
belonged appear stupid, and especially so when he lost his money
playing poker in the club-room (for the club had only one room), when
he might have put it away for her. He liked to talk with her about the
neighbors in the tenement, and his chance of political advancement to
the position of a watchman at the Custom-house Wharf, and hear her
play "Mary and John" on the melodeon. He boasted that she could make
it sound as well as it did on the barrel-organ.

He was very polite to her father and very much afraid of him, for he
was a most particular old man from the North of Ireland, and objected
to Hefty because he was a good Catholic and fond of street fights. He
also asked pertinently how Hefty expected to support a wife by
swimming from one pier to another on the chance of winning ten
dollars, and pointed out that even this precarious means of livelihood
would be shut off when the winter came. He much preferred "Patsy"
Moffat as a prospective son-in-law, because Moffat was one of the
propriet