"She _must_ live," she said: "she had got to live, to do something to
help him in the future.

[Illustration: CICELY AND THE BOY.]

"She couldn't die," she told me, "and leave him in a world that was so
hard for boys, where temptations and danger stood all round her boy's
pathway. Not only hidden perils, concealed from sight, so he might
possibly escape them, but open temptations, open dangers, made as alluring
as private avarice could make them, and made as respectable as dignified
legal enactments could make them,--all to draw her boy down the pathway
his poor father descended." For one of the curius things about Cicely wuz,
she didn't seem to blame Paul hardly a mite, nor not so very much the one
that enticed him to drink. She went back further than them: she laid the
blame onto our laws; she laid the responsibility onto the ones that made
'em, directly and indirectly, the legislators and the voters.

Curius that Cicely should feel so, when most everybody said that he could
have stopped drinking if he had wanted to. But then, I don't know as I
could blame her for feelin' so when I thought of Paul's chin and lips.
Why, anybody that had them on 'em, and was made up inside and outside
accordin', as folks be that have them looks; why, unless they was
specially guarded by good influences, and fenced off from bad ones,--why,
they _could not_ exert any self-denial and control and firmness.

Why, I jest followed that chin and that mouth right back through seven
generations of the Slide family. Paul's father wus a good man, had a good
face; took it from his mother: but his father, Paul's grandfather, died a
drunkard. They have got a oil-portrait of him at Paul's old home: I
stopped there on my way home from Cicely's one time. And for all the world