‘I never said anything about the penalties,’ said the other, waving his hand again. ‘They’re innumerable: but they’re irrelevant. The penalties are enormous. Drinking is not in the decalogue at all, you’ll acknowledge that. But if you consider consequences (which, however, I protest are irrelevant), there’s nothing, not even murder, that is punished so. It makes a wreck of everything--a young fellow’s looks, and his health, and all he stands upon. He pays for his glass with everything he has in the world. You may even steal without being caught for years: but if you drink you lose everything: there’s no escape for you and no hope. All that is true. Still it isn’t the sin that lying is, or cheating, or bearing false witness. These things are all in the commandments, but not drinking. So far as I can see, and I have had a great deal of time to think, we’re paid out for that in the present world. It’s not left over like the rest for--the other place, sir, the other place.’ ‘If you’d seen what I’ve seen,’ cried John, with honest, youthful fervour; ‘the harm it has done--oh, not to the brute himself, I don’t care a farthing for that! but to the helpless wife and children,--you would know better than to hesitate for a moment as to whether drinking is a sin.’ ‘If I’d seen what he’s seen!’ cried his strange companion, with that wonderful twinkle in his eye. The humour in it was tinged with the profoundest tragedy, though John, in his indignation, failed to see it. He began to laugh low to himself with a curious quiver of sound in his throat. ‘I’ve done more than see it. I’ve done it,’ he said: ‘broken the hearts of everybody I cared for in the world. You don’t know what I am. I am a man that have had a wife and children, and perhaps have still, for aught I know. I made them pay for my whisky, God knows I did: and myself, too--but that’s neither here nor there. As for the brute himself, as you say, who cares a farthing for him? I took it out of them and made them pay for it. But now they’ve shaken me off, glad perhaps to get shut of me. And if they’re living or dead I don’t know, and where they are I don’t know. That’s one of the penalties. I should know all about that, if any one does: I’m no neophyte-- I’m a man well instructed. But all these are consequences,’ he added, slowly. ‘They’re irrelevant. They don’t touch the principle. What you say I’ve gone over a thousand times. It’s juvenile, it’s elementary: it doesn’t touch the question at all: on which he thinks, bless us all--though he’s scarcely out of swaddling clothes--that he knows more than I!’ John was daunted, and he was impressed by the terrible story thus lightly glanced at. He did not know what to say. What he faltered forth at last was the question of a child in the midst of an exciting story. ‘And don’t you know where they are? and can’t you seek them out?’ If the stranger’s feelings had been affected before, he seemed to have got the better of his emotion now.