seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a
paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it. I
want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers
going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch. I want to see a
ninety-story building going up, and the wops crawling on it like ants.
I want to see the breadline, and the panhandlers, and the bums in
Union Square. I want a bellyful of the happy dust the old town hands
out--the whole dope and all there is of it! My God! I want everything
I haven't got!"

He looked at me, wildly. He was trembling violently, and sweat poured
down his face.

"Parson," he rasped, "I've bucked this thing for fair, but I've got to
go back and see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and know it
all again, or I'll go crazy. You're all of you so good down here
you're too much for me. _I'm home-sick for hell_. It--it comes over
me like fire over the damned. You don't fool yourself that folks who
know what it is to be damned can stay on in heaven without freezing,
do you? Well, they can't. I can't help it! I can't! I've got to
go--this time I've got to go!"

I sat and stared at him. Oh, what was it Paul had said we were to pray
for, at such a time as this?

"_And for me, that speech may be given to me ... that I may open my
mouth with confidence_..."

But the words wouldn't come.

"I've got to go! I've got to go, and try myself out!" he gritted.

"You--understand your risks," I managed to say through stiff lips. I
had always, in my secret heart, been more or less afraid of this.
Always had I feared that the rulers of the world of darkness, swooping
down and catching him unaware, might win the long fight in the end.

"Here you are safe. You are building up an honored name. You are
winning the respect and confidence of all decent people--and you wish
to undo it all. You wish to take such desperate chances--now!" I
groaned.

"I've got to go!" he burst forth, white-lipped. "You've never seen a
dip cut off from his dope, have you? Well, I'm it, when the old town
calls me loud enough for me to hear her plain. I've stood her off as
long as I could--and now I'm that crazy for her I could wallow in her
dust. Besides, there's not such a lot of risks. I don't have to leave
my card at the station-house to let 'em know I'm calling, do I? They
haven't been sitting on what they think is my grave to keep me from
getting up before Gabriel beats 'em to