“Well now, Harry, don’t you think yourself that it would be a great improvement, on canal boats, to give whisky a wide berth?”

“True as preachin’, Jim.”

“And yet you continue to make yourself a disgrace to your sex, and are in hot water half your time. Isn’t it so, Harry?”

Harry shook his sides over James’s plainness of speech, and admitted that the boy was right.

“I hate this beastly way of living,” continued James, “and I don’t see why a fellow should act like a brute, when he is a man. I don’t believe that you respect yourself, Harry.”

“Right again!” shouted Harry. “Yer see, if I did ’spect myself, I shouldn’t do as I do. That’s the trouble— I have no ’spect for myself.” And the poor, weak fellow never spoke a plainer truth in his life. Proper self-respect will lead such devotees of vice to reform, and be men.

“Yer see, Jim,” added Harry, “I couldn’t be like yer if I tried.”

“That’s bosh!” replied James. “Just as if a man can’t be decent when he tries! You can’t make that go, Harry. Throw whisky and tobacco overboard, as Murphy’s hat went, and the thing is done.”

“So you’d take all a feller’s comforts away, Jim, t’backer and all,” interposed Harry.

“Yes; and this awful profanity that I hear also,” retorted James. “I would make a clean sweep of the whole thing. What good does it all do?”

“What good! humph!” exclaimed Harry. “Yer are not fool ’nough to think we ’spect to do good in this way!” And Harry laughed again heartily, admitting the truth of James’s position, without proposing to defend himself.

“What do you do it for, then?”

“Do it for! don’t do it for nothin,’ Jim,” responded Harry. “Nary good or evil we are after.”

“You’re a bigger fool than I thought you were,” added James. “Making a brute of yourself for nothing. If that isn’t being a fool, then I don’t know what a fool is.”

Harry laughed more loudly than ever, as he turned away, accepting the advice of James in the same spirit in which it was tendered. That he was not at all offended is evident from the fact that he was heard to say to Murphy afterwards:

“Jim is a great feller. I’ve an orful itchin’ to see what sort of a man he’ll make. The way he rakes me down on whisky, t’backer, and swearing, is a caution; and he don’t say a word that ain’t true; that’s the trouble. And he says it in sich a way, that yer knows he means it. Jist think, Murphy; a boy on this old canal as don’t drink rum or smoke, or chew, or swear, or fight—would yer believe it, if yer didn’t see it?”

Murphy acknowledged that it was an anomaly on the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal, and hinted that he should like to know where the “feller” came from.

“I like him, though, Murphy,” Harry continued. “I allers liked a man to show his colours. I like to know where a feller is, if he be agin me. And Jim is so cute; he’ll beat the whole crowd on us tellin’ stories, only they are not nasty, like the rest on us tell. Isn’t he a deep one? He knows more’n all the crew put together, and two or three more boatloads added, into the bargain.”