He had walked slowly on, in painful abstraction, for about five minutes, when a hand was laid on his arm, and a familiar voice said—­

“Is this you, Graham!  Where in the name of Pluto have you been, for the last three weeks?  Why, how blue you look about the gills!  Havn’t been sick, I hope?”

“Indeed I have, Harry,” Alfred replied, in a feeble voices.  “It came very near being all over with me.”

“Indeed!  Well, what was the matter?”

Raising his hat, and displaying a long and still angry-looking wound on the side of his head, from which the hair had been carefully cut away, he said—­

“Do you see that?”

“I reckon I do.”

“Well, that came very near doing the business for me.”

“How did it happen?”

“I hardly know, myself.  I was drunk, I suppose, and quarrelled with some one, or insulted some one in the street—­and this was the consequence.”

“Really, Graham, you have made a narrow escape.”

“Havn’t I?  It kept me in bed for nearly three weeks, and now, I can just totter about.  This is the first time I have been outside of the house since it happened.”

“You certainly do look weak and feeble enough,” replied his old friend and crony, who added, in a moment after,

“But come! take a drink with me at the tavern across here.  You stand in need of something.”

“No objection, and thank you,” Alfred rejoined, at once moving over towards a well-known, low tavern, quenching in imagination a morbid thirst that seemed instantly created, by a draught of sweetened liquor.

“What will you take?” asked his friend, as the two came up to the counter.

“I’ll take a mint sling,” Alfred replied.

“Two mint slings,” said his companion, giving his orders to the bar-keeper.

“Hallo, Graham!  Is this you?” exclaimed one or two loungers, coming forward, and shaking him heartily by the hand.  “We had just made up our minds that you had joined the cold-water army.”

“Indeed!” suddenly ejaculated Graham, an instant consciousness of what he was, where he was, and what he was about to do, flashing over his mind.  “I wish to heaven your conclusion had been true!”

This sudden charge in his manner, and his earnestly, indeed solemnly expressed wish, were received with a burst of laughter.

“Here Dan,” said one, to the bar-keeper, “havn’t you a pledge for him to sign.”

“O, yes!  Bring a pledge!  Bring a pledge!  Has no one a pledge?” rejoined another, in a tone of ridicule.

“Yes, here is one,” said a man in a firm tone, entering the shop at the moment.  “Who wants to sign the pledge?”

“I do!” Graham said, in a calm voice.

“Then here it is,” the stranger replied, drawing a sheet of paper from his pocket, and unrolling it.

“Give me a pen Dan,” Alfred said, turning to the barkeeper.