The man was got not without difficulty to bed. His aspect to the young man seemed quite different from that of the ordinary sinners in the same way, whom he had seen often enough. He had a confused look of kindness and that jovial good-nature which appears in the Bacchanalian literature of the past, not like the sodden misery of drunkenness in the present time. Perhaps this social vice, which is so terrible in its consequences, has changed its characteristics, like other things. The man seemed to have the merry twinkle in his eyes when he opened them now and then, the humorous consciousness as of a bizarre and irresponsible condition which was not culpable, which belonged to an age when indulgence was common and supposed to be a venial fault, and associated with all sorts of fun and good-fellowship. Tipsiness bears no such aspect now: it is dull, sodden, miserable, a shame to see. The victim in the present case was as different as possible from the brutal drunkards, the wretched, pale, self-conscious sinners of a higher sphere, whom John had beheld with scorn from his eminence of youthful virtue. His eyes were not blear and sodden, as the eyes of such offenders are now-a-days, the gleam of mirth in them had no guilty look. ‘If you think I don’t see how ridiculous it all is, you are mistaken,’ they seemed to say. To think that John should ever have been moved to an almost sympathetic amusement by the looks of a man whom he had picked up in a state of intoxication in the street--to think that he should have been so much touched by his appearance as to pick the man up, to transport him to this familiar place, to exert himself so distinctly on behalf of an ex-convict, a criminal, a drunkard! How was it? he could not tell: and yet, after he had seen the unhappy man lying quietly asleep, John went away with a curious emotion in his heart. For one thing, the being to whom we have been kind, whom we have effectually served, always acquires an interest to the mind; our own consciousness of bounty, of charity, still more of mercy, throwing a favourable light on the recipient of it. And John said to himself that to have left a man who had at least the remains of something better about him, who had come out of prison perhaps with the intention of leading a different life, in the hands of such a coarse ruffian as Joe, was a thing which no one would willingly do. It was found, too, by the curiosity of the landlady, who emptied the poor man’s pockets in order that John might see that all was safe, that he had a considerable sum of money in his possession, which was a very strong reason why he should not be handed over in a helpless condition to the tender mercies of a penniless frequenter of the streets. John would not look over the contents of his _protégé’s_ pocket. He saw and counted the money at the woman’s request, but the other things he folded away in a sealed packet, with that high sense of the sacredness of