"Well, if you were joking," said Bingle, relieved, "all well and good,
but it didn't sound that way."

"You are a simple soul," was all that Joseph said, and then borrowed
fifty dollars from his nephew for a fresh start in the world, as he
expressed it. With this slender fortune in his purse he set out into a
world that knew him not, nor was it known to him.

He came back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away,
broken in health, old to the point of decrepitude, bedraggled, unkempt
and prideless. And once more Thomas Bingle took him in and provided
the prospective death-bed for him. They made the old derelict as
comfortable as it was in their power to do, and sacrificed not a
little in order that he might have some of the comforts of life.

He was a very humble, meek old man, and they pitied him. Screwing up
his courage, Mr. Bingle went one day to the home of the son of Joseph
Hooper and boldly suggested that, inasmuch as the mother was no longer
living, it would not be amiss for him and his sisters to take the
father who created them back into the family circle once more, and to
ease his declining years. Mr. Bingle was ordered out of the rich man's
office. Then he approached the two daughters, both of whom had married
well, and met with an even more painful reception. They not only
refused to recognise their father but declined to recognise their
father's nephew.

A few days afterward, a lawyer came to the bank to see Mr. Bingle. He
informed the bookkeeper that the Hooper family had been thinking
matters over and were prepared to pay him the sum of seventy-five
dollars a month for the care of Joseph Hooper, or, in other words,