"It was like a great shed, and it had the solid ground for a floor. On this floor there were kettles, or pans, set in brickwork, and each one of them had a little furnace under it, in which there was a charcoal fire. There must have been two hundred of these pans, and the heat from them was so great that it almost took away my breath. I don't believe I could exist there a day, and yet there were people who had to spend the entire day[Pg 268] in the firing-room, and go there day after day besides. Many of them were women, and some of them had little children strapped to their backs, and there was a whole lot of children in a little room at one side of the shed, where a couple of women were looking after them. How I did pity the poor things! Fred and I just emptied our pockets of all the small change we could find in them for the benefit of the babies, and I wish we could have given them more. But there was hardly a cry from any of them, and they seemed as happy and contented as though their mothers were queens, instead of toiling over the firing-pan in that hot room for ten or fifteen cents a day.
Ferry did not arrive, but day by day, night by night, we stalked the enemy, longing for our Captain to return to us. Quinn was fearless, daring, indefatigable; but Quinn was not Ferry. Often we talked it over by twos or fours; the swiftness of Ferry's divinations, the brilliant celerity with which he followed them out, the kindness of his care; Quinn's care of us was paternal, Ferry's was brotherly and motherly. We loved Quinn for the hate and scorn that overflowed from his very gaze upon everything false or base. But we loved Ferry for loving each and every one of us beyond his desert, and for a love which went farther yet, we fancied, when it lived and kept its health in every insalubrious atmosphere, from the sulphurous breath of old Dismukes to the carbonic-acid gas of Gholson's cant. We made great parade of recognizing his defects; it had all the fine show of a motion to reconsider. For example, we said, his serene obstinacy in small matters was equally exasperating and ridiculous; or, for another instance,--so and so; but in summing up we always lumped such failings as "the faults of his virtues," and neglected to catalogue them. Thinking it all over a thousand times since, I have concluded that the main source of his charm, what won our approval for whatever he did, however he did it, was that he seemed never to regard any one as the mere means to an end--except himself.Oh, indeed. Very likely in the sense that a{282} man may call his butler an old friend of the family. I should be quite pleased to speak of Parkinson like that. I am all for equality. We are all equal in the sight of Heaven, as Mr Silverdale says. Dear me, I wish I was his equal in energy: next month he holds a mission down at Easton Haven among all those ruffians at the docks, in addition to all his parish work."Where did you think I came from?"
ONE:"Hi! there goes one of them!--Halt!--Halt, you blue--" pop!--pop!--pop!
ONE:There was a sound at the top of the corridor, just the suggestion of a swish of silken drapery, and Gordon Bruce half turned. Under a cluster of electric lights stood Leona Lalage; she must have seen everything. It might have been fancy, it might have been a guilty conscience, but just for the moment Countess Lalage seemed transformed into a white fury with two murderous demons gleaming in her dark restless eyes. Then her silk and ivory fan fell from her hands, and Gordon hastened to recover it.
THREE:She had come back in the afternoon without her parcel, and his imagination pictured her{126} telling her brother all that had happened. He felt he must have cut a sorry figure. Thats the end of his books and his book-plates for me, would be the sort of way Norah would sum it all up. Probably they did not discuss it much: there really was very little need for comment on what he had done. The simple facts were sufficient: perhaps she had smiled again as she smiled when she rejected his first overtures.
THREE:"So you came, after all, Dr. Bruce?" she said playfully. She pressed his hand gently, her eyes were soft and luminous on his face. Any man whose affections had not been pledged elsewhere would have felt his pulses leaping. "Why?""Good-night," she responded, very musically, but as if from a great distance.
"Oh," said Arthur, smitten with embarrassment, "then I shan't see you again?"Fred thought he must say something, but was undecided for a moment. The room was open, and as he looked into the hall, he saw the chambermaid approaching the opposite door with the evident intention[Pg 38] of looking through the keyhole. This gave him his opportunity, and he proposed his question.A CHILD'S NURSE. A CHILD'S NURSE.I quite see your point, Mr Keeling, he said. Now you put it to me so plainly, I only wonder{75} that I did not think of it before. I am afraid we shall have a melancholy meeting.The Doctor explained that legal tender was the money which the law declares should be the proper tender, or offer, in paying a debt. "If[Pg 26] I owed your father a hundred dollars," said he, "I could not compel him to accept the whole amount in ten-cent pieces, or twenty-five-cent pieces, or even in half-dollars. When the government issues a coin, it places a limit for which that coin can be a legal tender. Thus the ten-cent piece is a legal tender for all debts of one dollar or less, and the half-dollar for debts of five dollars or less."
