ould say what a day might bring forth.
The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden
that he felt upon him. However, due credit must be given to his friend
Samuel O'Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to
a focus.

In these days O'Neill, having got his stiff factory law drafted, was
becoming concerned with the problem of landing it on the statute-books.
The complexion of the incoming legislature, which met in January,
promised to be conservative; and the Commissioner, breathing
threatenings and slaughter against the waist-coated interests which had
so flouted his warnings last winter, had decided that a preliminary
press campaign would be needed--beginning, say, November 1st--to arouse
public opinion to the needs of reform. The lively "Chronicle," the
"labor paper," offered space for a series of contributed articles from
the Commission office, always provided that "hot stuff" only was
furnished, by which was meant vigorous, if not libelous, assaults upon
the existing order.

Now it became the earnest wish of Commissioner O'Neill that these
hot-stuff articles should be written for him by his friend V.V., of the
reformatory passions and the pen of a ready writer. And, the whole
subject having been discussed several times in an indecisive sort of
way, O'Neill one night whacked out a jagged argument.

"I had 'em going eight months ago--was starting out for Heth's with an
axe--and you asked me to leave 'em to you. I thought you had
something--an idea.... Say, V.V., suppose we'd gone and out bagged 'em
then, like I wanted--would your friend Corinne be lyin' at death's
door now?"

There was, indeed, nothing precisely original in this inquiry; but, put
by another, and in so bald a form, it undoubtedly came upon a man
somewhat stark and hard. The two men stood talking on a street corner,
where they had met by chance, and their conversation here came to an
end. V.V.'s reply to Sam's question was indefinite, to say the least of
it. He merely observed that he must be getting on back to the office;
adding that he didn't like to be absent for any length of time just now.
But he didn't say at all, by that annoying habit of reserve he had,
whether or not he would agree to write the _articles! That_ was what
Samuel O'Neill wanted to know....

It was September now, the third night. At his office the doctor found
two calls for him, noted on a scrap of brown wrapping-paper in the
rudimenta