evenings in music-halls; he lost his ambition, and he began to lead a
double life. In the end he took to presenting himself at the theatre in
various stages of drunkenness, and on one unlucky night he practically
settled his own fate by falling down on the stage after he had blundered
over his lines a dozen times. The public saw little of him after that,
for he had not the power of Kean, or Cooke, or Brooke.

They all go the same way when they slip as Devine did. You can meet them
on the roads, in common lodging-houses, in the workhouse. The residuum
is constantly recruited from the "comfortable" classes, and, out of
thousands of cases, I never knew half-a-dozen in which the cause was not
drink. I blame nobody. A drunkard is always selfish--the most selfish of
created beings--and his flashes of generosity are symptoms of disease.
If he lives to be cured of his vice his selfishness disappears, and he
is another man; but so long as he is mastered by the craving, all things
on earth are blotted out for him saving his own miserable personality.
So far does the disease of egotism go, that it is impossible to find a
drunkard who can so much as listen to another person; he is inexorably
impelled to utter forth _his_ views with more or less incoherence.

Devine, the tender husband, the kind father, became a mere slinker, a
haunter of tap-rooms, a weed. Sometimes he was lucky enough to win a
pound or two on a race, and that was his only means of support. The
children were ragged; Letty tried to live on tea and bread, but the lack
of food soon brought her low, and from sheer weakness she became a
pitiful slattern.

Mr. Billiter was informed that a woman "like a beggar" wanted to see him
particularly. He was about to order her off at first, but he finished by
going to the door, and the beggar-woman went on her knees to him. He