daughters should go out to service in respectable families. This
thought sweetened his toil. When he got on well enough to build a shop
for himself, he burdened himself with debt, building it firmly and
well, so as to last out his boys' time as well as his own. When he was
employed on the joiner-work of some of those large houses in Algonquin
Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters
employed as house-maids in them. He studied the faces and the words of
the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they
would make kind and considerate employers. He put many an extra stroke
of fine work upon the servants' rooms he finished, thinking: "Who knows
but my Mattie may live here sometime?"

But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so
easily managed. His boys never occupied the old shop on Dean Street,
which was built with so many sacrifices and so much of hopeful love.
One of them ran away from home on the first intimation that he was
expected to learn his father's trade, shipped as a cabin-boy on one of
the lake steamers, and was drowned in a storm which destroyed the
vessel. The other, less defiant or less energetic, entered the shop and
attained some proficiency in the work. But as he grew toward manhood,
he became, as the old man called it, "trifling"; a word which bore with
it in the local dialect no suggestion of levity or vivacity, for Luke
Matchin was as dark and lowering a lout as you would readily find. But
it meant that he became more and more unpunctual, did his work worse
month by month, came home later at night, and was continually seen,
when not in the shop, with a gang of low ruffians, whose head-quarters
were in a den called the "Bird of Paradise," on the lake shore. When
his father remonstrated with him, he met everything with sullen
silence. If Saul lost his temper at this mute insolence and spoke
sharply, the boy would retort with an evil grin that made the honest