her baby, his hand lifted
once with the fingers crooked in mysterious agony. Some one started a
hymn in the street below and people took it up, bawling desperately for
comfort to their souls. Mate Snow didn't sing. He stood motionless
between the box-trees, staring up at the lighted window shades, as if
waiting. By-and-by Minister Malden came down the steps, and moving away
beside him like a drunken man, went to live in the two rooms over the
drugstore. And that was the beginning of it.

* * *

Folks said Mate Snow was not the kind to forget an injury, and yet it
was Mate who stood behind the minister through those first days of shock
and scandal, who out-faced the congregation with his stubborn, tight
lips, and who shut off the whisperings of the Dorcas Guild with the
sentence which was destined to become a sort of formula on his tongue
through the ensuing years:

"You don't know what's wrong, and neither do I; but we can all see the
man's a saint, can't we?"

"But the woman?" some still persisted.

"Sympathy Gibbs? You ought to know Sympathy Gibbs by this time."

And if there was a faint curling at the corners of his lips, they were
all too dull to wonder at it. As for me, the boy, I took the changing
phenomena of life pretty well for granted, and wasted little of my
golden time speculating about such things. But as I look back now on the
blunt end of those Urkey days, I seem to see Minister Malden growing
smaller as he comes nearer, and Mate Snow growing larger--Mate Snow
browbeating the congregation with a more and more menacing
righteousness--Minister Malden, in his protecting shadow, leaner,
grayer, his eyes burning with an ever fiercer zeal, escaping Center
Church and slipping away to redeem the Chinaman.

"There is more joy in heaven over one sinner," was his inspiration, his
justification, and, I suspect, his blessed opiate.

But it must have been hard on Yen Sin. I remember him now, a
steam-blurred silhouette, earlier than the earliest, later than the
latest, swaying over his tubs and sad-irons in the shanty on the
stranded scow by Pickett's wharf, dreaming perhaps of the populous
rivers of his birth, or of the rats he ate, or of the opium he smoked at
dead of night, or of those weird, heathen idols before which he bowed
down his shining head--familiar and inscrutable alien.

An evening comes back to me when I sat in Yen Sin's shop and waited for
my first "stand up" collar to be ironed, listening wi