"But about your wife, neighbour. You cannot deny that you are in the habit of treating her roughly; and that last affair, you know, which has brought you here————"
"She shouldn't have given me so much tongue," said the old man. "She is always giving me tongue, she is!"
"Well, neighbour," said I, when poor Bean had come to an end of his story and his complaints, "I really am very sorry for you. I can plainly see, from everything you have told me, that you have been badly used all your life, up to the present time."
"Ah, I thought you would say so when you came to know the rights of it," said my poor neighbour, suddenly brightening up a little.
"You have had one enemy in particular who has always set himself against you. I think I happen to know who it is," I said.
"More than one; lots of them," poor old Ned protested.
"Let us stick to that one," I went on. "I'll tell you about him. To begin at the beginning, it was he who would not permit you to get any good out of the teaching you had when you were a poor little orphan boy. It was he, only you did not know it, who sent you wandering over the country as a tramp and vagabond, when you might have gone on comfortably and respectably with your first master. It was he who took away your character and branded you as a thief. It was this same enemy of yours who, when you grew older, sent you to the beershop, when you would otherwise have been industriously at work, or sitting at home quietly and happily with your wife and children. It is he who set your children against you, and drove them, as you say, 'to the bad,' my poor neighbour. You don't know it, but this same person has destroyed your peace and pleasure in your own house, and has robbed you of pounds and pounds, which would have helped to make you comfortable in your old age."
"I wish I knew who he is!" exclaimed the old man, rousing himself excitedly.
"I will tell you, neighbour; but I have one thing more to say about this enemy——I have great reason to believe that he is doing a good deal to shorten your life."
"You don't say that, sir!" cried the poor man, with some signs of alarm. "But now you speak of it," he continued, "I have felt sometimes as if I was being poisoned."