He needed something to restore his confidence, but was happily unaware of the nature of the remedy his system demanded.
It was his first offense.
He raised the window for a breath of fresh air, and the roaring street called him.
There was mockery and invitation in its hubbub. Why not? A little exercise would bring him around to his point of moral departure.
So, hastily adjusting the third chapter to his waistcoat and donning the balance of his garments, he fitted his hat to his head with thoughtful caution and hurried to the bustling thoroughfare.
Preoccupied by his gradually lessening disabilities, Dennis did not remark that the course pursued by him had the house of the publisher as its terminus, until he stood directly before that august establishment.
As the young Irishman recognized his surroundings, it did not take him long to persuade himself, with native superstition, as he considered the unaware nature of his arrival, that Providence had directed his footsteps thither, and, with the species of courage that can come from such a basis, he proceeded to the rearway, where he beheld the Celt in whom his hopes were centered, berating the porters, with a mien which offered anything but encouragement to the anxious young man.
However, he came forward tentatively, and found himself, presently, so much within the radius of the foreman’s range of vision as to be compelled to accept, with enforced urbanity, the vituperation of the draymen, who objected to the amount of landscape he occupied with his bulk and eager personality.
At last, when the foreman had bullied his lusty understudies into a certain degree of sullen system, and the drays began to move away with their mysterious burdens, Dennis ventured to address him.
Greatly to his relief, the perturbed countenance of the latter softened perceptibly as he exclaimed: