pon his acquittal."

"Acquittal?"

"Didn't I say he had friends?"

There was a pause, broken at last by the herb-doctor's saying: "Well,
there is a bright side to everything. If this speak prosaically for
justice, it speaks romantically for friendship! But go on, my fine
fellow."

"My say being said, they told me I might go. I said I could not without
help. So the constables helped me, asking _where_ would I go? I told
them back to the 'Tombs.' I knew no other place. 'But where are your
friends?' said they. 'I have none.' So they put me into a hand-barrow
with an awning to it, and wheeled me down to the dock and on board a
boat, and away to Blackwell's Island to the Corporation Hospital. There
I got worse--got pretty much as you see me now. Couldn't cure me. After
three years, I grew sick of lying in a grated iron bed alongside of
groaning thieves and mouldering burglars. They gave me five silver
dollars, and these crutches, and I hobbled off. I had an only brother
who went to Indiana, years ago. I begged about, to make up a sum to go
to him; got to Indiana at last, and they directed me to his grave. It
was on a great plain, in a log-church yard with a stump fence, the old
gray roots sticking all ways like moose-antlers. The bier, set over the
grave, it being the last dug, was of green hickory; bark on, and green
twigs sprouting from it. Some one had planted a bunch of violets on the
mound, but it was a poor soil (always choose the poorest soils for
grave-yards), and they were all dried to tinder. I was going to sit and
rest myself on the bier and think about my brother in heaven, but the
bier broke down, the legs being only tacked. So, after driving some hogs
out of the yard that were rooting there, I came away, and, not to make
too long a story of it, here I am, drifting down stream like any other
bit of wreck."

The herb-doctor was silent for a time, buried in thought. At last,
raising his head, he said: "I have considered your whole story, my
friend, and strove to consider it in the light of a commentary on what I
believe to be the system of things; but it so jars with all, is so
incompatible with all, that you must pardon me, if I honestly tell you,
I cannot believe it."

"That don't surprise me."

"How?"

"Hardly anybody believes my story, and so to most I tell a different
one."

"How, again?"

"Wait here a bit and I'll show ye."

With that, taking off his rag of a cap, and arranging his tattered