"And what good's your schoolin' done you? Couldn't you have the sense to ask and find? What ever do you suppose God gave you your tongue for?--to set with your mouth wide open? Little plagues can talk fast enough when they ain't wanted to it!" She then suggested, most unfairly, that Lizarann was detaining her by holding out false hopes of information. "_I_ should like to know how long you expect me to stand here askin' questions. This time o' night! And me wanted to look after your uncle! _Get_ down into your bed and ha' done with it! _I_ can't waste _my_ time talkin' to you." After which she departed and locked the door; Lizarann could not imagine why. But there was something very queer with Uncle Bob, who had been audible all the time in fitful outbreaks, conveying a sense of his adjective applied as a stigma to many things, and as a refreshing emphasis to parts of speech. Lizarann's last impression--a hazy one, before deep sleep came, and total oblivion--was that her aunt went out from the house, leaving the street door on the jar, and that then she heard the voice of their neighbour Mrs. Hacker, saying, "He'll be all right by morning." Now this little maiden attached only two ideas to this husband of her aunt: one, that he was a painful concomitant of all their lives, who had to be put up with, and where was the use of complainin'?--the other that he was the victim of a liver-disorder known as "the boil." His absorption of gin was part of himself; a practice as much identified with him as any inherent quality or fixed condition; perhaps the celibacy of a priesthood presents a sort of parallel case. So all new and strange developments in Uncle Bob were credited to this disorder, and when Mrs. Hacker from over the way said the patient would be all right by morning, the only suggestion to Lizarann's drowsy mind was that there was a bottle of doctor's stuff never been took, and that it had just come in handy. For--but perhaps you know this?--the masses, _par excellence_, account all drugs good for all diseases, if took reg'lar. The classes, prone to affectation, get prescriptions made up each time. So the child was soon sound asleep and happy. * * * * * But the cobbler's disorder was the first beginning of the end of a long devotion to gin, and, to speak scientifically--always do so when you can!--he was in a very advanced condition of Alcoholism. But he was very unlike the priest, who, in the most advanced conditions of celibacy, passes his life--poor fellow!--in secret longing for the remedy. For Mr. Steptoe hugged his Alcoholism, caressed it, and fed it constantly with new supplies of raw gin. His affection for the cause of his disease was self-supporting, and he longed for small goes of it as keenly as the priest longs for the proper antidotes of his--for Home and Love.