I guess he wasn't strong on civic morality as they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of his.

He was a little fellow--not big as the Irish usually grow--and I could wear his clothes, though I wasn't thirteen at the time.

The coat wasn't an old one, either," he explained with retrospective complacency; "no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there--it's all just as he left it--and eat supper with him--the best supper I ever had in my life before or since, you may take my word for it.

Then when I'd finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed--" He broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added softly: "Who'd ever have thought on that night that this place would one day belong to me ?" "Did you see him again ?" "After that he never lost sight of me.

He got me a room, he sent me to school--not that he thought much of education, the more's the pity--and when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics' Institute, and gave me a job at engineering.