He passed within the shade of the great elm, and then suddenly came to a full stop. A few yards in front of him the boy was performing his imaginary violin solo on a broken string, and the sight went straight to the heart of that musical faculty whose shy divinity was the flute. For a few moments he stood looking on in silence, with all the sympathy of a musician for a comrade in poverty and distress. Other ties also bound him to the boy. If the divine voice had said to the Reverend James Moore: "Among all the people of this town, it will be allowed you to save but one soul. Choose you which that shall be," he would have replied: "Lord, this is a hard saying, for I wish to save them all. But if I must choose, let it be the soul of this lad." The boy's father and he had been boyhood friends in Virginia, room-mates and classmates in college, and together they had come to Kentucky. Summoned to the tavern on the night of the fatal brawl, he had reached the scene only in time to lay his old playfellow's head on his bosom, and hear his last words: "Be kind to my boy!... Be a better father to him than I have been!... Watch over him and help him!... Guard him from temptation!... Be kind to him in his little weaknesses!... Win his heart, and you can do everything with him!... Promise me this!" "So help me Heaven, all that I can do for him I will do!" [Illustration: Man kneeling at bedside] From that moment he had taken upon his conscience, already toiling beneath its load of cares, the burden of this sacred responsibility. During the three years of his guardianship that had elapsed, this burden had not grown lighter; for apparently he had failed to acquire any influence over the lad, or to establish the least friendship with him. It was a difficult nature that had been bequeathed him to master--sensitive, emotional, delicate, wayward, gay, rebellious of restraint, loving freedom like the poet and the artist. The Reverend James Moore, sitting in the chair of logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and belles-lettres; lecturing daily to young men on all the powers and operations of the human mind, taking it to pieces and putting it together and understanding it so perfectly, knowing by name every possible form of fallacy and root of evil--the Reverend James Moore, when he came to study the living mind of this boy, confessed to himself that he was as great a dunce as the greatest in his classes. But he loved the boy, nevertheless, with the lonely resources of his nature, and he never lost hope that he would turn to him in the end. How long he might have stood now looking on and absorbed with the scene, it is impossible to say; for the lad, happening to look up and see him, instantly, with a sidelong scoop of his hand, the treasures on the sidewalk disappeared in a cavernous pocket, and the next moment he had seized his crutch, and was busy fumbling at a loosened nail.