CHAPTER VIII.

WE were sitting one evening at the night school which Joshua still kept up, the room full of men and women of what the world calls the worst kind, when the door was flung open with a clatter, and Joe Traill, shabbier and dirtier than ever, staggered in half-drunk. I do not know if I have said that Joshua had at last succeeded in getting him a situation, where he would have done well enough had he kept off drink; but he had not; and this was the upshot after about three months' fair sailing.

"It's no use, governor," he said to Joshua,

in his drunken way; "work and no lush too hard for me, governor! I'd got to fall soft!"

"Well Joe, my man, it seems that you have fallen soft enough this time; as soft as mud!" said Joshua. "However, sit down and make no noise. I will talk to you byand-by."

"Not a copper!" said Joe, turning his pockets inside out and holding on by the tips. "I've come back like the devil, worse than I went!"

66

'All right, friend, but not just now; let me go on with what I have in hand, and then I'll attend to you.'

But Joe was in that state when a man is either maudlin or quarrelsome. He was the latter; and partly because he had still sense enough to be ashamed of himself, and partly

because he was pricking all over like a porcupine with the drink, and wanted to have it out with some one, he chose to try and fasten a quarrel on Joshua. So he set at him again; this time with some ribaldry I'll not lower myself to repeat. And again Joshua answered him mildly, but more authoritatively than before.

"Sit down," he said; and I don't think I ever heard his voice sound so hard and stern. "You've made a sore enough job of it for one day; don't add to your disgrace by folly."

Then the bad blood, the bad convict blood that never got quite clear away, boiled up in Joe, and he let out from his shoulder and struck Joshua on his head, at the side just above the ear. A dozen men rose at once;

a dozen voices cursed and swore, some at

M

Joe for the blow, some yahing at Joshua for not returning it; women shrieked; the forms were upset as the men scrambled forward; and the quiet night-school was turned into a roaring Babel of tumult and violence. One brawny fellow-he too was a burglar, a man who might at any time develop into a murderer; but he had more fibre in him than poor, loose, slippery Joe, more to go upon as it were, and so could be held in hand better if once you could master his brutality-he squared up to the drunken creature, on whom already half-a-dozen hands were fiercely laid. But Joshua, who had turned white and sick-looking with the blow, laid his left hand on Jim's big arm, while he held out his right to Joe Traill, saying; "Why Joe! strike at a man, and your friend, for nothing! You must be

dreaming, my son, and a bad dream too! Give us your hand, and wake up out of it!"

I can tell nothing more. There was nothing perhaps in the words, but there was that in the look of him, as he stood there so white and yet so kingly, with one hand keeping back Jim Graves, the other offered to Joe squirming in the grasp of those who held him, that acted like a spell on all the room. There were men there, and women too, who would have been ready to tear him in pieces themselves if they had suspected for an instant that his loving leniency was from cowardice; but it was no coward who confronted the drunkard that had struck him, who confronted that roaring, yelling crowd of desperate men and women, and calmed them all by his own unutterable dignity. The same intense look that had come into