“Come!” caused him to follow his guides mechanically.

Soon the storm burst over their heads, and raged with a wild fury, such as he had never before witnessed.  The wind howled through the streets and alleys of the city, with the roar of thunder; while the deep reverberations following every broad sheet of lightning that blazed through the whole circle of the heavens, was as the roar of a dissolving universe.  Amid all this, the rain fell like a deluge.  But the rum-seller’s guides paused not, and he kept steadily onwards after them, shrinking now into the shelter of the houses, and now breasting the fierce storm with a momentary desperate resolution.

Through street after street, lined on either side with wretched tenements that seemed tottering and just ready to fall, and through alley after alley, where squalid misery had hid itself from the eye of general observation, did they pass, in what seemed to Mr. Graves an interminable succession; At last the woman and her child paused at the door of an old, wretched-looking frame house, that appeared just ready to sink to the ground with decay.

“This is the place, sir.  Come in!  Your victim would see you before he dies,” the woman said in a deep voice that made a chill run through every nerve, at the same time that she looked him sternly and with an expression of malignant triumph in the face.

Unable to resist the impulse that drove him onward, the rum-seller entered the house.

“See there, sir!  Look!  Behold the work of your own hands!” exclaimed the woman with startling emphasis, as he found himself in a room, with a few old rags in one corner of it for a bed, upon which lay, in the last sad agonies of dissolution, his old customer, Bill Riley, who, he had been that day informed by his bar-keeper, had joined the temperance society.

“There, sir!  See there!” she continued, grasping his arm, and dragging him up to where the miserable wretch lay.  “Look at him!—­Bill—­Bill!” she continued, stooping down, while she still held tightly the rum-seller’s arm, and shaking the dying man.  “Bill—­Bill!  Here he is.  You said you wanted to see him!  Now curse him, Bill!  Curse him with your dying breath!” And the woman’s voice rose to a wild shriek.

The wretch, thus rudely and suddenly called back from the brink of death into a painful consciousness of existence, half rose up, and stared wildly around him for a moment or two.

“Here he is, Bill!  Here he is!” resumed his wife, again shaking him violently.

“Who?  Who?” inquired the dying man.

“Why, the rum-seller, who robbed you of your hard earnings, that he might roll in wealth and feast daily on luxuries, while your wife and children were starving!  Here he is.  Curse him now, with your dying breath!  Curse him, I say, Bill Riley!  Curse him!”

“Who?  Who?” eagerly asked the wretched being, a thrill of new life seeming to flash through his exhausted frame—­“Old Graves?  Where is he?”