In the sweet fields of Eden,
Where the tree of life is blooming,
There is rest for you!"

What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
tie, this "hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye," as Jake
Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and blue-
shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred song
with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that did its
work in spite of all prejudice? It was as if he were counsel in one of
those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at first
arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating their
intelligences. Whenever he had done this he had been drinking hard, was
in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in which his
brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful. Was it
the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural as when
under this influence? That then and only then the real man spoke, that
then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it supplied the
thing left out of him at birth?

"There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you!"

One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
the refrain: