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“So, our neighbor, Mr. Guzzle, has been arranged at
the bar for drunkardice,” said Mrs. Partington; and she
sighed as she thought of his wife and children at home,
with the cold weather close at hand, and the searching
winds intruding through the chinks in the windows and
waving the tattered curtain like a banner, where the
little ones stood shivering by the faint embers. “God
forgive him and pity them!” said she, in a tone of
voice tremulous with emotion.

“But he was bailed out,” said Ike, who had devoured
the residue of the paragraph, and laid the paper in a pan
of liquid custard that the dame was preparing for
Thanksgiving, and sat swinging the oven door to and fro
as if to fan the fire that crackled and blazed within.

“Bailed out, was he?” said she; “well, I should
think it would have been cheaper to have pumped him
out, for, when our cellar was filled, arter the city fathers
had degraded the street, we had to have it pumped out,
though there was n't half so much in it as he has swilled
down.”

She paused and reached up on the high shelves of the
closet for her pie plates, while Ike busied himself in
tasting the various preparations. The dame thought
that was the smallest quart of sweet cidier she had ever
seen.