"Certainly. Business before pleasure. Pump him all you can, and then come in. You'll find me at one of the tables on the farther side." Perkins passed on.
"You won't go in, my young friend?" said the temperance man.
"What is it to you whether I go in or stay out?" asked Brent, in a tone of assumed carelessness.
"I want to keep every man I kin from walkin' the path that I walked and sufferin' as I suffer." He was seized with a fit of coughing. His face was old and very thin, and his hands, even in that hot air, were blue as with cold. "I wisht you'd go to our meetin' to-night. We've got a powerful speaker there, that 'll show you the evils of drink better 'n I kin."
"Where is this great meeting?" Brent tried to put a sneer into his voice, but an unaccountable tremor ruined its effect.
He was duly directed to the hall. "I may come around," he said, carelessly, and sauntered off, leaving the man coughing beside the door of the beer-garden. "Given all of his life to the devil," he mused, "drunk himself to death, and now seeking to steal into heaven by giving away a few tracts in
