hought of nothing but to get through, I
used to think he had the pride of a thousand women in every one of his
muscles and nerves: a little applause would fill him with a mad kind of
fury of delight and triumph. South had a story that George belonged to
some old Knickerbocker family, and had run off from home years ago. I
don't know. There was that wild restless blood in him that no home could
have kept him.

We were to stay so long in this town that I found rooms for us with an
old couple named Peters, who had but lately moved in from the country,
and had half a dozen carpenters and masons boarding with them. It was
cheaper than the hotel, and George preferred that kind of people to
educated men, which made me doubt that story of his having been a
gentleman. The old woman Peters was uneasy about taking us, and spoke
out quite freely about it when we called, not knowing that George and I
were Balacchi Brothers ourselves.

"The house has been respectable so far, gentlemen," she said. "I don't
know what about taking in them half-naked, drunken play-actors. What do
you say, Susy?" to her granddaughter.

"Wait till you see them, grandmother," the girl said gently. "I should
think that men whose lives depended every night on their steady eyes and
nerves would not dare to touch liquor."

"You are quite right--nor even tobacco," said George. It was such a
prompt, sensible thing for the little girl to say that he looked at her
attentively a minute, and then went up to the old lady smiling: "We
don't look like drinking men, do we, madam?"

"No, no, sir. I did not know that you were the I-talians." She was quite
flustered and frightened, and said cordially enough how glad she was to
have us both. But it was George she shook hands with. There was
something clean and strong and inspiring about that man that made most
women friendly to him on sight.

Why, in two days you'd have thought he'd never had another home than the
Peters's. He helped the old man milk, and had tinkered up the broken
kitchen-table, and put in half a dozen window-panes, and was intimate
with all the boarders; could give the masons the prices of job-work at
the East, and put Stoll the carpenter on the idea of contract houses,
out of which he afterward made a fortune. It was nothing but jokes and
fun and shouts of laughter when he was in the house: even the old man
brightened up and told some capital stories. But from the first I
noticed that George's eye