eveloped in his cups, and afterward clung to,
in moments of exhilaration or excitement, an indescribably faint but
perfectly distinct Hibernian accent. It was the heritage to which he
was heir, and made his eager and earnest rendering of "Annabel Lee" so
pathetic that Beau Larch wept, and knocked a glass off the table....

Men came and sat with them, and Aladdin discovered in himself what
he had hitherto never suspected--the power of becoming heart-to-heart
friends with strangers in two seconds.

Aladdin was never able to remember just how or when or with whom they
left the Boat Club. He only remembered walking and walking and talking
and talking, and finally arguing a knotty question, on which all
defended the same side, and then sitting down on the steps of a house
in a low quarter of the town, and pouring the ramifications of all his
troubles into the thoroughly sympathetic if somewhat noncomprehending
ears of Beau Larch. He talked long and became drunker as he talked,
while Larch became soberer. Then Aladdin remembered that the door at the
top of the steps had opened, and a frowzy head had been stuck out, and
that a brassy voice, with something at once pathetic and wheedling in
it, had said:

"Aren't you coming in, boys?"

Then Aladdin remembered that Beau Larch and he had had angry words,
and that Beau Larch had told him not to make an ass of himself, and for
heaven's sake to go home. To which Aladdin had retorted that he was old
enough to know what was good for him, and hated the world and didn't
give a damn who knew it, and wouldn't go home. Aladdin could swear that
after that he only closed his eyes for a second to shut out something or
other, and that when he opened them, the reverberation of a door closing
was in his ears. But for all that Beau Larch had gone, and was to be
seen neither up the street nor down. Although his own was past mending,
Beau Larch, drunk as he was, had done a good deed that night, for he had
guarded a precious innocence against the assaults of a drunken little
Irish boy who was feeling down about something--a girl named something
or other, Beau Larch thought, and another boy named something or other.
The next day Beau had forgotten even that much.

Aladdin thought that Larch was hiding in jest. He arose unsteadily and
wandered off in search of him. After a time he found himself before
the door of his own house. There were lights in the parlor, and Aladdin
became almost sober. He r