had happened to him. His crumpled clothes were dank with
dew. His eyes were puddles of utter stupefaction. He had been sleeping
in the Park, and walking in his sleep, and in all probability it was my
shot which had brought him to himself; of this, however, I was less sure,
and in my doubt I was disastrously inspired to accuse him of having fired
the shot himself. It never struck me that he could mistake the body
behind me for a living man; it was with a wild idea of being the first to
accuse the other, that I asked him if he knew what he had done, and seized
his revolver at the same moment. I had the wit to grasp it in my hot
hand until the barrel was just warm enough to help me convince the child
that he really had fired the shot; but, since he could not see it for
myself, I was not going out of my way just then to tell him it was a fatal
shot. Already I regretted that I had gone so far, and yet already I saw
myself committed to a course of action as rash as it was now inevitable.
The boy became convulsed with asthma; I could not leave him there, to tell
his story when the body was discovered, to have it disproved perhaps on
the spot, at the latest on a comparison of bullets, and the truth brought
home to me through his description. Again, when I had taken him to my
house, with all sorts of foolish precautions, and still more foolish
risks, I had to keep him there. How could I let him loose to blurt out
his story and implicate me more readily than ever after what he had seen
of me at home? I had to keep him there--I repeat it--alive or dead. And I
was not the kind of murderer (if I am one at all) to take a young and
innocent life, if I could help it, to preserve my own; on the contrary, I
had, and I hope I always should have had, humanity enough at least to do
what I could for a fellow-creature battling with an attack which almost
threatened to remove him from my path without my aid."

There followed a few remarks on Pocket's character as the writer read it.
They were not uncomplimentary to Pocket personally, but they betrayed a
profound disdain for the typically British institution of which Pocket was
too readily accepted as a representative product. His general ignorance
and credulity received a grim tribute; they were the very qualities the
doctor would have demanded in a chosen dupe. Yet he appeared to have
enjoyed the youth's society, his transparent honesty, his capacity for
enthusiastic interest, whe