“Oh, Mr. Scott!” he said, “for God’s sake, my wife and my child!  The last of seven!”

“You scoundrel!  Do you mean to say you saved yourself before Katie and your child!”

Archie did not wait for the answer; again he was at the window of the burning room.  Too late!  The flames were already devouring what the smoke had smothered; their wretched pallet was a funeral pyre.  He had hardly time to save his own life.

“They are dead, Semple!”

Then the poor creature burst into a paroxysm of grief, moaned and cried, and begged a few shillings, and vowed he was the most miserable creature on earth.

After this Archie Scott strove for two years to do without taint of selfishness what his father had begun twenty years before.  But there was not much now left to work upon—­health, honor, self-respect were all gone.  Poor Semple was content to eat the bread of dependence, and then make boastful speeches of his former wealth and position.  To tell of his wonderful schemes, and to abuse his luck and his false friends, and everything and everybody, but the real cause of his misfortune.

Archie gave him some trifling post, with a salary sufficient for every decent want, and never heeded, though he knew Semple constantly spoke ill of him behind his back.

However the trial of Archie’s patience and promise did not last very long.  It was a cold, snowy night in mid-winter that Archie was called upon to exercise for the last time his charity and forbearance toward him; and the parting scene paid for all.  For, in the shadow of the grave, the poor, struggling soul dropped all pretences, acknowledged all its shortcomings, thanked the forbearance and charity which had been extended so many years, and humbly repented of its lost and wasted opportunities.

“Draw close to me, Archie Scott,” he said, “and tell your four brave boys what my dying words to them were:  Never to yield to temptation for only this once.  To be quite sure that all the gear and gold that comes with sin will go with sorrow.  And never to doubt that to every evil doer will certainly come his evil day.”

PETRALTO’S LOVE STORY.

I am addicted to making strange friendships, to liking people whom I have no conventional authority to like—­people out of “my set,” and not always of my own nationality.  I do not say that I have always been fortunate in these ventures; but I have had sufficient splendid exceptions to excuse the social aberration, and make me think that all of us might oftener trust our own instincts, oftener accept the friends that circumstance and opportunity offer us, with advantage.  At any rate, the peradventure in chance associations has always been very attractive to me.

In some irregular way I became acquainted with Petralto Garcia.  I believe I owed the introduction to my beautiful hound, Lutha; but, at any rate, our first conversation was quite as sensible as if we had gone through the legitimate initiation.  I know it was in the mountains, and that within an hour our tastes and sympathies had touched each other at twenty different points.