t stood undauntedly by him, and inveighed with anger
against what he proclaimed to be an unnatural law.

'Do you know Constantinople?' he asked one evening as the two sat
together.

'Yes,' Paul answered; 'I know it tourist fashion. I stayed a week there
once.'

'You remember the tribes of yellow dogs who make night hideous?' Ralston
questioned. 'They hunt in packs, and eat any raffle of the streets which
may be thrown to 'em. I've seen 'em wolfing cardboard boxes that have
been swept out of the drapers' shops in the early morning, the poor
hungry devils! They'd fall across any intruder from another parish
and crunch him hide and bones. But they never attack one another, and
there's no record of one yellow dog who tried to eat another yellow dog
who belonged to the same gang. There's a mighty difference between the
canine and the human, eh? You're one of our breed, Armstrong--yellow
dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe--and your comrades haven't the
gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur. They get round you and
worry you,' he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with
an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one
gesture of rage--'they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful
of lineage, and they'd gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for
the same reward.'

'As bad as that?' asked Paul, with a dreary little laugh.

'As bad as that, sir!' Ralston declared wrathfully, though he too
laughed a moment at his own vehemence.

But the fighting Ralston was on fire with his theme, and returned to it
often.

'You had a namesake once,' he said, 'who was an Apostle. He talked with
a centurion, who told him, "With a great price I obtained this freedom."
With a great price! I wonder if it were like the price we pay for what
we call the freedom of the press. I fought for that in my own day,
fought and suffered, and paid in coin and heart's blood, and I have
asked myself since if I am glad or sorry that I won. Are we the better
for having bred this vulture crowd?'

The hot heart of the advocate warmed the cold heart of the sufferer from
time to time, but neither long nor often. The coals of anger will
not burn freely on any honest hearth when the conscience of the owner
compels him to turn down the damper every other minute.

The cause in the Law Courts lingered, and the seasons changed Paul's
friendships stopped away--not by ones or twos, but in battalions. Poor
li