rike. Eleven o'clock; it
was ten when he came away; how he must have driven! His thoughts
caught up the word. Driven,--by what? Driven from his house in
horror, through street and lane, over half the city,--driven,--hunted
in terror, and smitten by a shock here! Driven,--driven! He could
not rid his mind of the word, nor of the meaning it suggested.
The pavements about him began to ring and echo with the tramp of
many feet, and the cold, brittle air was shivered with the noisy
voices that had roared and bawled applause and laughter at the
National Theatre all the evening, and were now singing and howling
homeward. Groups of rude men, and ruder boys, their breaths steaming
in the icy air, began to tramp by, jostling him as they passed,
till he was forced to draw back to the wall, and give them the
sidewalk. Dazed and giddy, in cold fear, and with the returning
sense of something near him, he stood and watched the groups that
pushed and tumbled in through the entrance of the oyster-room,
whistling and chattering as they went, and banging the door behind
them. He noticed that some came out presently, banging the door
harder, and went, smoking and shouting, down the street. Still
they poured in and out, while the street was startled with their
stimulated riot, and the bar-room within echoed their trampling
feet and hoarse voices. Then, as his glance wandered upward to
his tenant's window, he thought of the sick child, mixing this
hideous discord in the dreams of fever. The word brought up the name
and the thought of his dead friend. "In the name of the Saviour,
I charge you be true and tender to mankind!" The memory of these
words seemed to ring clearly, as if a voice had spoken them, above
the roar that suddenly rose in his mind. In that moment he felt
himself a wretched and most guilty man. He felt that his cruel
words had entered that humble home, to make desperate poverty more
desperate, to sicken sickness, and to sadden sorrow. Before him
was the dram-shop, let and licensed to nourish the worst and most
brutal appetites and instincts of human natures, at the sacrifice
of all their highest and holiest tendencies. The throng of tipplers
and drunkards was swarming through its hopeless door, to gulp the
fiery liquor whose fumes give all shames, vices, miseries, and
crimes a lawless strength and life, and change the man into the
pig or tiger. Murder was done, or nearly done, within those walls
last night. Within those wall