* * * * *

I slowly turned my head.  I resumed my spoon.

“The kitchen clock is nearly half an hour too slow,” observed Alison.  “I told Jane that you would have it fixed this week.”

I finished my soup in silence.

It may interest the reader to learn that up to the date of this article
“I still live.”

“Little Tommy Tucker.”

There were but three persons in the car; a merchant, deep in the income list of the “Traveller,” an old lady with two bandboxes, a man in the corner with his hat pulled over his eyes.

Tommy opened the door, peeped in, hesitated, looked into another car, came back, gave his little fiddle a shove on his shoulder, and walked in.

  “Hi!  Little Tommy Tucker
  Plays for his supper,”

shouted the young exquisite lounging on the platform in tan-colored coat and lavender kid gloves.

“O Kids, you’re there, are you?  Well, I’d rather play for it than loaf for it, I had,” said Tommy, stoutly.

The merchant shot a careless glance over the top of his paper, at the sound of this petit dialogue, and the old lady smiled benignly; the man in the corner neither looked nor smiled.

Nobody would have thought, to look at that man in the corner, that he was at that very moment deserting a wife and five children.  Yet that is precisely what he was doing.

A villain?  O no, that is not the word.  A brute?  Not by any means.  A man, weak, unfortunate, discouraged, and selfish, as weak, unfortunate, and discouraged people are apt to be; that was the amount of it.  His panoramas never paid him for the use of his halls.  His travelling tin-type saloon had trundled him into a sheriff’s hands.  His petroleum speculations had crashed like a bubble.  His black and gold sign, J.  Harmon, Photographer, had swung now for nearly a year over the dentist’s rooms, and he had had the patronage of precisely six old women and three babies.  He had drifted to the theatre in the evenings, he did not care now to remember how many times,—­the fellows asked him, and it made him forget his troubles; the next morning his empty purse would gape at him, and Annie’s mouth would quiver.  A man must have his glass too, on Sundays, and—­well, perhaps a little oftener.  He had not always been fit to go to work after it; and Annie’s mouth would quiver.  It will be seen at once that it was exceedingly hard on a man that his wife’s mouth should quiver.  “Confound it!  Why couldn’t she scold or cry?  These still women aggravated a fellow beyond reason.”