soon heard remarks from street loafers, as he passed along, which
indicated that the devotional exercises of the family had been
reported, evidently by his own children, and he heard quotations from
some of his weak and halting prayers pass from mouth to mouth and
elicit peals of coarse laughter.

Nevertheless he found some encouragement. His son Tom was not quite so
much of a cub at home as he had been, and actually took to trying, in a
desultory way, to find work, although his father's offer to teach him
the trade which had been learned in the penitentiary was declined very
sharply and without any thanks whatever. Billy, the younger boy, had an
affectionate streak in his nature, which his father succeeded in
touching to such an extent that complaints of Billy's truancy were
nowhere near so numerous as they had been just after his father's
return. Mary, the youngest daughter, was a less promising subject. Her
precocity was of a very unpleasant order, and caused her father a great
deal of annoyance.

When everything else failed him, Sam had the baby for consolation. The
little wretch had been so utterly uncared for since its appearance that
it seemed surprised for some time by its father's demonstrations of
affection, but finally the meaning of this seemed made known to it,
probably in the way the same meanings are translated to babies
everywhere else, and from being a forlorn and fretful child it
gradually became so cheerful that its own mother began to display some
interest in it and make a plaything of it, to her own manifest
advantage.

But Jane, the elder daughter, who was a woman in stature and already
knew more of the world than is good for women in general, was a