him, and said in a thick,
wondering voice:

"Who the dickens be you?"

"I'm an old friend of yours. Don't you know me? I used to be Tode Mall.
Don't you remember? Come, take my arm; you and I have walked arm in arm
down Broadway many a time; let us walk together now down this aisle and
sign the pledge together."

For all answer Jerry turned astounded eyes upon the speaker, and
muttered in an under tone:

"You be hanged! 'Tain't no such--yes, 'tis--no 'tain't--'tis,
too--them's his eyes and his nose! I'll be shot if it ain't Tode Mall
himself!"

"Yes," said Theodore, "I'm myself positively, and I want you to come
with me and sign that pledge. I signed it years ago, and with God's help
it has made a man of me. It will help you, Jerry. Come."

Great was the rustle of excitement in the hall as the notorious Jerry
presently moved down the aisle leaning on the arm of the orator, and it
began to be whispered through the crowd that he was once a resident of
Albany, and actually a friend of that "dreadful Jerry Collins!" Many and
wild were the surmises concerning him; but Theodore, all unconscious and
indifferent, glowed with thankful pride as he steadied the pen in the
trembling hand, and saw poor Jerry's name fairly written under the
solemn pledge. On the morrow the eager search for the missing father was
continued, aided by Jerry and by several others as it gradually began to
dawn upon their minds who the father was, and who and what the son had
become. Utterly in vain! Had the earth on some dark night opened
suddenly and silently and swallowed him, he could not, it would seem,
have passed more utterly from mortal knowledge than he had. As the
search grew more fruitless Theodore's anxiety deepened. He prayed and
mourned over that lost father, and it was with an unutterably sad heart
that he finally dropped as a worthless straw the last seeming clew and
gave him up.

There was one other sacred duty to perform. When the orphan son left
Albany one winter morning there stood in one of the marble shops of the
city, ready to be set up with the first breath of spring, a plain and
simple tombstone bearing for record only these two words, "Dear Mother,"
and underneath this seemingly inappropriate inscription, understood only
by himself, "Before they call I will answer, and while they are yet
speaking I will hear." The day was unusually cold in which Theodore, on
his homeward journey, was delayed at a quiet little town. The Ex