eavily. But he quickly rallied.

"Do I get you right?" he queried. "Does he write those hymns for other
folks to sign?"

"He does."

"What does he do that for?"

"Money. He gets as high as five dollars per stanza."

"Some salesman!" My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure
overhanging the fence with new respect. "Looks to me like the original
Gloom," he observed. "What's _his_ grouch?"

"Conscience."

"He must have a bum one!"

"He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow
repenting of our sins."

"Whose sins?" asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.

"Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square."

My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had
long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a
monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. "He's got a nerve!"
he asserted.

Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my
theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for
Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a
usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never
do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to
account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against
the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little
house near the corner"--I waved an illustrative hand--"he can quote
Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him.
He's coming this way now."

"Good day, Dominie," said Bartholomew Storrs, as he passed, in such a
tone as a very superior angel might employ toward a particularly
damned soul.

"That frown," I explained to my companion, after returning the
salutation, "means that I failed to attend church yesterday."

But the hard, pink man had lost interest in Bartholomew. "Called you
'Dominie,' didn't he?" he remarked. "I thought I had you right. Heard of
you from a little red-headed ginger-box named Smith."

"You know the Little Red Doctor?"

"I met him," he replied evasively. "He told me to look you up. 'You talk
to the Dominie,' he says."

"About what?"

"I'm coming to that." He leaned forward to place a muscular and
confidential hand on my knee. "First, I'd like to do you a little
favor," he continued in his husky and intimate voice. "If you're looking
for some quick and easy money, I got a little tip that I'd like to pass