Jim was the only married man among us. His wife and three children were in Brooklyn, and Jim went home every Saturday night, and spent Sunday with them. He was a handsome young Scotsman, with curling brown hair, and brown eyes, and a well-formed mustache, and a round face with full features. In the casual flow of our talk, Jim spoke of Burns, and quoted him with a ready familiarity. It was easy to catch the drift of his liking. Its set was steadily toward passages which sing the wrongs and oppression of the poor. Jim had none of the tricks of a declaimer; but with jerks of unstudied emphasis he repeated familiar lines until you were conscious of new meaning and strength. He was sitting with his chair tilted against the wall, and his heels resting on a round, and his hands clasped about his knees. His eyes were fixed upon the evening gloom as he recited: Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn. The verses seemed exactly to fit his mood, for he repeated them again and again, with lingering liking for their sense and alliteration. Jerry broke in abruptly here with sudden, unmeasured condemnation of the dulness of evenings in a country town in the absence of the theatre, pronounced theátre. The drama had fired his imagination for the moment, for he broke through his wonted reserve and waxed fluent as he expressed his views: "When I go to the theátre, I go to laugh. I want to see pretty girls and lots of them, and I want to see them dance. I want songs as I can understand the words of, and lots of jokes, and horse-play. You don't get me to the theátre to see no show got up by Shakespeare, nor any of them fellows as lived two thousand years ago. What did they know about us fellows as is living now? Pete, you mind that Tim Healy in the union, him that's full of wind in the meetings? Onct he give me a book to read, and he says it's a theátre piece wrote by Shakespeare, and the best there was. I read more'n an hour on that piece, and I'm damned if there was a joke into it, nor any sense neither." We were presently yawning under the stars, and I was more than glad when the men spoke of bed. Almost in the next moment, to my consciousness, Mrs. Flaherty was knocking on the door, bidding us wake and not to go to sleep again, for it was six o'clock.