itin' to see if Uncle John would try to follow 'em and
make 'em come home so's he could persecute 'em some more. I wanted to do
that, but they said if he did come I mightn't be strong enough to
hold him and----" The brave lad paused again, modestly. Miss Spence's
expression was encouraging. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, and
there may have been in them, also, the mingled beginnings of admiration
and self-reproach. Penrod, warming to his work, felt safer every moment.

"And so," he continued, "I had to sit up with Aunt Clara. She had some
pretty big bruises, too, and I had to----"

"But why didn't they send for a doctor?" However, this question was only
a flicker of dying incredulity.

"Oh, they didn't want any DOCTOR," exclaimed the inspired realist
promptly. "They don't want anybody to HEAR about it because Uncle John
might reform--and then where'd he be if everybody knew he'd been a
drunkard and whipped his wife and baby daughter?"

"Oh!" said Miss Spence.

"You see, he used to be upright as anybody," he went on explanatively.
"It all begun----"

"Began, Penrod."

"Yes'm. It all commenced from the first day he let those travelling men
coax him into the saloon." Penrod narrated the downfall of his Uncle
John at length. In detail he was nothing short of plethoric; and
incident followed incident, sketched with such vividness, such abundance
of colour, and such verisimilitude to a drunkard's life as a drunkard's
life should be, that had Miss Spence possessed the rather chilling
attributes of William J. Burns himself, the last trace of skepticism
must have vanished from her mind. Besides, there are two things that
will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has
taken to drink. And in every sense it was a moving picture which, with
simple but eloquent words, the virtuous Penrod set before his teacher.

His eloquence increased with what it fed on; and as with the eloquence
so with self-reproach in the gentle bosom of the teacher. She cleared
her throat with difficulty once or twice, during his description of his
ministering night with Aunt Clara. "And I said to her, 'Why, Aunt Clara,
what's the use of takin' on so about it?' And I said, 'Now, Aunt Clara,
all the crying in the world can't make things any better.' And then
she'd just keep catchin' hold of me, and sob and kind of holler, and I'd
say, 'DON'T cry, Aunt Clara--PLEASE don't cry."'

Then, under the influence of some fragmentar