large houses in Algonquin Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters employed as house-maids in them.  He studied the faces and the words of the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they would make kind and considerate employers.  He put many an extra stroke of fine work upon the servants’ rooms he finished, thinking:  “Who knows but my Mattie may live here sometime?”

But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so easily managed.  His boys never occupied the old shop on Dean Street, which was built with so many sacrifices and so much of hopeful love.  One of them ran away from home on the first intimation that he was expected to learn his father’s trade, shipped as a cabin-boy on one of the lake steamers, and was drowned in a storm which destroyed the vessel.  The other, less defiant or less energetic, entered the shop and attained some proficiency in the work.  But as he grew toward manhood, he became, as the old man called it, “trifling”; a word which bore with it in the local dialect no suggestion of levity or vivacity, for Luke Matchin was as dark and lowering a lout as you would readily find.  But it meant that he became more and more unpunctual, did his work worse month by month, came home later at night, and was continually seen, when not in the shop, with a gang of low ruffians, whose head-quarters were in a den called the “Bird of Paradise,” on the lake shore.  When his father remonstrated with him, he met everything with sullen silence.  If Saul lost his temper at this mute insolence and spoke sharply, the boy would retort with an evil grin that made the honest man’s heart ache.

“Father,” he said one day, “you’d a big sight better let me alone, if you don’t want to drive me out of this ranch.  I wasn’t born to make a nigger of myself in a free country, and you can just bet your life I ain’t a-going to do it.”

These things grieved Saul Matchin so that his anger would die away.  At last, one morning, after a daring burglary had been committed in Buffland, two policemen were seen by Luke Matchin approaching the shop.  He threw open a back window, jumped out and ran rapidly down to the steep bluff overlooking the lake.  When the officers entered, Saul was alone in the place.  They asked after his boy, and he said: 

“He can’t be far away.  What do you want of him?  He hain’t been doing nothing, I hope.”

“Nothing, so far as we know, but we are after two fellows who go by the names of Maumee Jake and Dutch George.  Luke runs with them sometimes, and he could make a pile of money by helping of us get them.”

“I’ll tell him when he comes in,” said Saul, but he never saw or heard of his son again.