"I've never told the whole straight ahead, ma'am. The Lord knows it all, an' there've been times I couldn't ha' done it, an' wouldn't ha' done it if I could ha' helped it. For, you see, in spite of the deviltry I never quite got rid of the sense that God sat lookin' at me, an' that, I do suppose, came from what stuck to me, whether or no, in the school. An' you'd wonder that anything stuck or could. "I'll begin at the beginnin'. Drink? No, it wasn't _my_ drinkin'. You'd think that must ha' been it, but it wasn't, for all I came up in the Fourth Ward--the only sober bartender the ward ever see, or ever will see, I reckon. "The very first thing that ever I remember is my mother dead drunk on the floor. I thought it was dead without the drunk, an' stood screamin'; an' my father come up an' some of the neighbors. We was all respectable then, an' one of them says, 'The Lord help you, Mr. Brown! She's begun ag'in.' He didn't speak, but just lifted her up an' put her on the bed, and then he sat down and covered up his face with his hands, an' was so still I thought he was dead too. I crawled up to him whimperin', an' he lifted me up. "'Jack,' he says, 'my heart's broke. It's no use: she's bound to go to the bad, an' maybe you'll take after her.' "I screamed ag'in, though I didn't know what that meant, but he hushed me. 'Jack,' he said, 'you're a little fellow, an' your troubles ain't begun yet. I'd give my life this minute to take you with me.' He held me up to him tight an' took my breath, so 't I couldn't ask him where; an' then he cried. "That was the beginnin' of me, if gettin' a gleam of sense means beginnin' for folks; for, though I didn't know what it all meant, I did know he wanted comfort bad as I did, an' we hugged up to one another. But I know now all the ins and the outs, for I was told by one that knew them both. "She was a pretty girl in a mill in Fall River--fast, like some of them, but with an innocent face an' big blue eyes, like a child's, to the very last. Many's the time I've seen 'em with no more sense, nor as much, as a baby's in 'em. He was a young shoemaker, that fell in love with the pretty face, an' married her out of hand then an' there, an' took her to New York, where he'd got a good place--foreman in a factory. His folks lived in Fall River, and hers off somewheres. I haven't never seen any of 'em, an' good reason not to want to. "She liked fine clothes, an' thought she was goin' to be a lady an' do nothin'; an' when the first baby come it was a bother to her, for she wasn't strong, an' one of the neighbors told her to drink beer. There's no use spinnin' it out. It began with beer, but it ended with whiskey, an' the first my father ever knew was the dead baby that she'd killed rollin' over on it in a drunken sleep.