erary nor artistic, but some
of them had right generous hearts. On being interrogated by one of his
messmates as to his business, Robert Louis replied that he was a
stone-mason. The man looked at his long, slim, artistic fingers and knew
better, but he did not laugh.

He respected this young man with the hectic flush, reverenced his secret
whatever it might be, and smuggled delicacies from the cook's galley for
the alleged stone-mason. "Thus did he shovel coals of fire on my head
until to ease my heart I called him aft one moonlight night and told him
I was no stone-mason, and begged him to forgive me for having sought to
deceive one of God's own gentlemen." Meantime, every day our emigrant
turned out a little good copy, and this made life endurable, for was it
not Robert Louis himself who gave us this immortal line, "I know what
pleasure is, for I have done good work"?

He was going to her. Arriving in New York he straightway invested two
good dollars in a telegram to San Francisco, and five cents in postage
on a letter to Edinburgh. These two things done he would take time to
rest up for a few days in New York. One of the passengers had given him
the address of a plain and respectable tavern, where an honest laborer
of scanty purse could find food and lodging. This was Number Ten West
Street.

Robert Louis dare not trust himself to the regular transfer-company, so
he listened to the siren song of the owner of a one-horse express-wagon
who explained that the distance to Number Ten West Street was something
to be dreaded, and that five dollars for the passenger and his two tin
boxes was like doing it for nothing. The money was paid; the boxes were
loaded into the wagon, and Robert Louis seated upon one of them, with a
horse-blanket around him, in the midst of a pouring rain, the driver
cracked his whip and started away. He drove three blocks to the
starboard and one to port, and backed up in front of Number Ten West
Street, which proved to be almost directly across the street from the
place where the "Devonia" was docked. But strangers in a strange country
can not argue--they can only submit.

The landlord looked over the new arrival from behind the bar, and then
through a little window called for his wife to come in from the kitchen.
The appearance of the dripping emigrant who insisted in answer to their
questions that he was not sick, and that he needed nothing, made an
appeal to the mother-heart of this wife of a