uestion like
that? You ought to know well enough that I never drank in my life. If I
haven't told you so again and again, I should think other people could
have done it."

"Never drank anyding, eh? never in your life? Vell, vell!" said the
proprietor, caressing the beer-shop cat for a moment, "dat explains a
good many dings about you dat I never understood before. I tell you vat
I tink, deacon: if you'd been brought up in my country, mit all de
brains you've got in your head, and yoost could'a'had a lot of German
beer put inside of you besides, you'd been about de finest man in de
United States now. Den, besides dat, of course, you ought to belong to
my shurch, too."

"Your church!" sneered the deacon.

"Come, now, deacon," said the shopkeeper, abruptly dropping the cat,
"you can turn up your nose at my ideas all you vant, but you mustn't
turn it up at my shurch. I don't do dat to you, and don't you forget
it, eider."

"That's all right, Conrad; I didn't mean to do it. Of course, every man
will believe the way he is brought up. But I hope you won't go to
telling anybody else in this town that that poor convict ought to be
drinking and will have to do it again; because it might get to his
ears, you know, and if it did it might break him down, and then he'd go
to lying and stealing and loafing and fighting again, and there is no
knowing whose chicken-coops and wood-piles would have to suffer. Yours
might be one of the first of the lot."

"Vell," said the German, "is dat de vay you look at the question?"

"It's a fact, isn't it?"

"Yes, I s'pose it is. But I didn't tink dat vas de first ding for a man
like you to tink about ven you vas talkin' about a feller dat has broke
off all his bad habits and is tryin' to be yoost right."

The deacon felt awkward for a moment. He did not like to be reminded of
any of his faults by a neighbor, much less by one who belonged to a
church so widely different from his own.

"Why, of course not," said he; "of course, I am thinking about the
man's eternal salvation and about his future; but, to tell you the
truth, I haven't got much faith in his professions. A man that don't
get any further than he has done, and that don't seem willing to learn
from them that's his betters and has gone into such things a good deal
deeper than he has, ain't very likely to hold out. And the last
condition of that man will be worse than the first."

"Vell," said the shop-keeper, "a good deal depend