iting
bit of business in Mr. Armstrong's probable lawsuit, the greater part of
it was doubtless due to those stirrings of the more kindly, healthy sap
of human feeling, by which goodness tries to get the upper hand in us
whenever it seems to have the slightest chance--on Sunday mornings,
perhaps, when we are set free from the grinding hurry of the week, and
take the little three-year old on our knee at breakfast to share our egg
and muffin; in moments of trouble, when death visits our roof or illness
makes us dependent on the tending hand of a slighted wife; in quiet talks
with an aged mother, of the days when we stood at her knee with our first
picture-book, or wrote her loving letters from school. In the man whose
childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can
be touched to gentle issues, and Mr. Dempster, whom you have hitherto
seen only as the orator of the Red Lion, and the drunken tyrant of a
dreary midnight home, was the first-born darling son of a fair little
mother. That mother was living still, and her own large black easy-chair,
where she sat knitting through the livelong day, was now set ready for
her at the breakfast-table, by her son's side, a sleek tortoise-shell cat
acting as provisional incumbent.

'Good morning, Mamsey! why, you're looking as fresh as a daisy this
morning. You're getting young again', said Mr. Dempster, looking up from
his newspaper when the little old lady entered. A very little old lady
she was, with a pale, scarcely wrinkled face, hair of that peculiar white
which tells that the locks have once been blond, a natty pure white cap
on her head, and a white shawl pinned over her shoulders. You saw at a
glance that she had been a mignonne blonde, strangely unlike her tall,
ugly, dingy-complexioned son; unlike her daughter-in-law, too, whose
large-featured brunette beauty seemed always thrown into higher relief by
the white presence of little Mamsey. The unlikeness between Janet and her
mother-in-law went deeper than outline and complexion, and indeed there
was little sympathy between them, for old Mrs. Dempster had not yet
learned to believe that her son, Robert, would have gone wrong if he had
married the right woman--a meek woman like herself, who would have borne
him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper. In spite of Janet's
tenderness and attention to her, she had had little love for her
daughter-in-law from the first, and had witnessed the sad growth