“I like it better than the Down and Out, where they won’t let ye backslide no more. Why, I was in at Stinson’s one day and there was a chap there—Rollins was his name, a plumber—just enj’yin’ of himself like—nothink wrong—and come to find out he’d been one of their men. Well, what do ye think, sonny? A fellow named Pyncheon blew in—awful ’ard drinker for a young ’and, he used to be—and he sat down beside Rollins and pled with ’im and plod with ’im, and—well, ye don’t see Rollins round Stinson’s no more. I tell ye, sonny, ye carn’t put nothing over on ’em. They knows all the tricks and all the trade. Give me kind-’earted ladies; give me ministers of the gospel; give me the stool o’ repentance two or three times a month; but don’t give me fellas that because they’ve knocked off the booze theirselves wants every one else to knock it off, too, and don’t let it be a free country.” We came to the corner to which I had been directing our seemingly aimless steps. It was a corner where the big red and green jars that had once been the symbols for medicines within now stood as a sign for soda-water and ice-cream. “Let’s go in here.” Lovey hung back. “What’s the use of that? That ain’t no saloon.” “Come on and let us try.” Pushing open the screen door, I made him pass in before me. We found ourselves in front of a white counter fitted up like a kind of bar. As a bar of any sort was better than none, Lovey’s face took on a leaden shade of brightness. In the way of a guardian all we could see at first was a white-coated back bent behind the counter. When it straightened up it was topped by a friendly, boyish face. Lovey leaped back, pulling me by the arm. “That’s that very young Pyncheon I was a-tellin’ you of,” he whispered, tragically; “him what got Rollins, the plumber, out of Stinson’s. Let’s ’ook it, sonny! He won’t do us no good.” But the boyish face had already begun to beam. “Hel-lo, old sport! Haven’t seen you in a pair of blue moons. Put it there!” The welcome was the more disconcerting because in the mirror behind Pyncheon I could see myself in contrast to his clean, young, manly figure. I have said I was shabby without being hideously so, but that was before I had slept a fourth night on the bare boards of a lumber-yard, to be drenched with rain in the morning. It was also before I had gone a fourth morning without shaving, and with nothing more thorough in the way of a wash than I could steal in a station lavatory. The want of food, the want of drink, to say nothing of the unspeakable anguish within, had stamped me, moreover, with something woebegone and spectral which, now that I saw it reflected in the daylight, shook me to the soul.