“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” shouted one onlooker.  “Cut it out, fellows!  It’s no use!  You can’t set him cussing.  He never learned how.  He could easier lead in prayer.  You have to teach him how.  Better cut it out!”

More tortures were applied, but still the victim was silent.  The hose had washed him clean again, and his face shone white from the drenching.  Some one suggested it was getting late and the show would begin.  Some one else suggested they must dress up Little Stevie for his first play.  There was a mad rush for garments.  Any garments, no matter whose.  A pair of sporty trousers, socks of brilliant colors—­not mates, an old football shoe on one foot, a dancing-pump on the other, a white vest and a swallow-tail put on backward, collar and tie also backward, a large pair of white-cotton gloves commonly used by workmen for rough work—­Johnson, who earned his way in college by tending furnaces, furnished these.  Stephen bore it all, grim, unflinching, until they set him up before his mirror and let him see himself, completing the costume by a high silk hat crammed down upon his wet curls.  He looked at the guy he was and suddenly he turned upon them and smiled, his broad, merry smile! After all that he could see the joke and smile!  He never opened his lips nor spoke—­just smiled.

“He’s a pretty good guy!  He’s game, all right!” murmured some one in Courtland’s ear.  And then, half shamedly, they caught him high upon their shoulders and bore him down the stairs and out the door.

The theater was some distance off.  They bore down upon a trolley-car and took a wild possession.  They sang their songs and yelled themselves hoarse.  People turned and watched and smiled, setting this down as one more prank of those university fellows.

They swarmed into the theater, with Stephen in their midst, and took noisy occupancy.  Opera-glasses were turned their way, and the girls nudged one another and talked about the man in the middle with the queer garments.

The persecutions had by no means ceased because they had landed their victim in a public place.  They made him ridiculous at every breath.  They took off his hat, arranged his collar, and smoothed his hair as if he were a baby.  They wiped his nose with many a flourishing handkerchief, and pointed out objects of interest about the theater in open derision of his supposed ignorance, to the growing amusement of those of the audience who were their neighbors.  And when the curtain rose on the most notoriously flagrant play the city boasted, they added to its flagrance by their whispered explanations and remarks.

Stephen, in his ridiculous garb, sat in their midst, a prisoner, and watched the play he would not have chosen to see; watched it with a face of growing indignation; a face so speaking in its righteous wrath that those about who saw him turned to look again, and somehow felt condemned for being there.