ght, for the glass of the lamp was dirty, and the gas was bad;
but the light that came from it was, notwithstanding, as certainly
light as if it had come from the sun itself, and the baby knew that, and
smiled to it; and although it was indeed a wretched room which that lamp
lighted--so dreary, and dirty, and empty, and hopeless!--there in the
middle of it sat Diamond on a stool, smiling to the baby, and the baby
on his knees smiling to the lamp. The father of him sat staring at
nothing, neither asleep nor awake, not quite lost in stupidity either,
for through it all he was dimly angry with himself, he did not know
why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was
miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of
the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond,
speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love
speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice
depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai,
it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St.
John it was perfect blessedness.

By and by he became aware that there was a voice of singing in the room.
This, of course, was the voice of Diamond singing to the baby--song
after song, every one as foolish as another to the cabman, for he was
too tipsy to part one word from another: all the words mixed up in his
ear in a gurgle without division or stop; for such was the way he spoke
himself, when he was in this horrid condition. But the baby was more
than content with Diamond's songs, and Diamond himself was so contented
with what the songs were all about, that he did not care a bit about the
songs themselves, if only baby liked them. But they did the cabman good
as well as the baby and Diamond, for they put him to sleep, and the
sleep was busy all the time it lasted, smoothing the wrinkles out of his
temper.

At length Diamond grew tired of singing, and began to talk to the baby
instead. And as soon as he stopped singing, the cabman began to wake up.
His brain was a little clearer now, his temper a little smoother,
and his heart not quite so dirty. He began to listen and he went on
listening, and heard Diamond saying to the baby something like this, for
he thought the cabman was asleep:

"Poor daddy! Baby's daddy takes too much beer and gin, and that makes
him somebody else, and not his own self at all. Baby's dadd