of the house had been delivered, even to the bricks for the chimney, the lime for the plastering, and the last clapboard and shingle.  The planning, the chaffing, the merry stories of which Number Nine was the scene that winter, the grand, absorbing interest in the enterprise in which these three men were engaged, it would be pleasant to recount, but they may safely be left to the reader’s imagination.  What was Sam Yates doing?

He lived up to the letter of his instructions.  Finding himself in the possession of an assured livelihood, respectably dressed and engaged in steady employment, his appetite for drink loosened its cruel hold upon him, and he was once more in possession of himself.  All the week long he was busy in visiting hospitals, alms-houses and lunatic asylums, and in examining their records and the mortuary records of the city.  Sometimes he presented himself at the doors of public institutions as a philanthropist, preparing by personal inspection for writing some book, or getting statistics, or establishing an institution on behalf of a public benefactor.  Sometimes he went in the character of a lawyer, in search of a man who had fallen heir to a fortune.  He had always a plausible story to tell, and found no difficulty in obtaining an entrance at all the doors to which his inquisition led him.  He was treated everywhere so courteously that his self-respect was wonderfully nourished, and he began to feel as if it were possible for him to become a man again.

On every Saturday night, according to Mr. Belcher’s command, he made his appearance in the little basement-room of the grand residence, where he was first presented to the reader.  On these occasions he always brought a clean record of what he had done during the week, which he read to Mr. Belcher, and then passed into that gentleman’s hands, to be filed away and preserved.  On every visit, too, he was made to feel that he was a slave.  As his self-respect rose from week to week, the coarse and brutal treatment of the proprietor was increased.  Mr. Belcher feared that the man was getting above his business, and that, as the time approached when he might need something very different from these harmless investigations, his instrument might become too fine for use.

Besides the ministry to his self-respect which his labors rendered, there was another influence upon Sam Yates that tended to confirm its effects.  He had in his investigations come into intimate contact with the results of all forms of vice.  Idiocy, insanity, poverty, moral debasement, disease in a thousand repulsive forms, all these had frightened and disgusted him.  On the direct road to one of these terrible goals he had been traveling.  He knew it, and, with a shudder many times repeated, felt it.  He had been arrested in the downward road, and, God helping him, he would never resume it.  He had witnessed brutal cruelties and neglect among officials that maddened him.  The professional indifference of keepers and nurses towards those who, if vicious, were still unfortunate and helpless, offended and outraged all of manhood there was left in him.