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        THE INTERNET WIRETAP ELECTRONIC EDITION OF

                      The Wrecker

                           By
                 Robert Louis Stevenson

             written in collaboration with
                     Lloyd Osbourne

                    Edinburgh Edition
                          1896

     Prepared by John Hamm 

             This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN,
                   released January 1994

     Scanned with OmniPage Professional OCR software
               donated by Caere Corporation.

                           
                           
                       PROLOGUE
                           
                           
                   IN THE MARQUESAS

IT was about three o'clock of a winter's afternoon in
Tai-o-hae, the French capital and port of entry of the
Marquesas Islands.  The trades blew strong and squally;
the surf roared loud on the shingle beach; and the
fifty-ton schooner of war, that carries the flag and
influence of France about the islands of the cannibal
group, rolled at her moorings under Prison Hill.  The
clouds hung low and black on the surrounding
amphitheatre of mountains; rain had fallen earlier in
the day, real tropic rain, a waterspout for violence;
and the green and gloomy brow of the mountain was still
seamed with many silver threads of torrent.

In these hot and healthy islands winter is but a name.
The rain had not refreshed, nor could the wind
invigorate, the dwellers of Tai-o-hae: away at one end,
indeed, the commandant was directing some changes in
the residency garden beyond Prison Hill; and the
gardeners, being all convicts, had no choice but to
continue to obey.  All other folks slumbered and took
their rest: Vaekehu, the native Queen, in her trim
house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian
commissary, in his be-flagged official residence; the
merchants, in their deserted stores; and even the club-
servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the
bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the
cards of navy officers.  In the whole length of the
single shoreside street, with its scattered board
houses looking to the sea, its grateful shade of palms
and green jungle of puraos, no moving figure could be
seen.  Only, at the end of the rickety pier, that once
(in the prosperous days of the American rebellion) was
used to groan under the cotton of John Hart, there
might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous
tattooed white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.

His eyes were open, staring down the bay.  He saw the
mountains droop, as they approached the entrance, and
break down in cliffs: the surf boil white round the two
sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight of
blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled
mountain-tops.  But his mind would take no account of
these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along
the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would
serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown
faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and
chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would
recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn;
he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating
festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that
island princess for the love of whom he had submitted
his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now
sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so
strange a figure of a European.  Or perhaps, from yet
further back, sounds and scents of England and his
childhood might assail him: the merry clamour of
cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song
of the river on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer
a ship about either sentinel, close enough to toss a
biscuit on the rocks.  Thus it chanced that, as the
tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was startled
into wakefulness and animation by the appearance of a
flying jib beyond the western islet.  Two more
headsails followed; and before the tattooed man had
scrambled to his feet, a topsail schooner, of some
hundred tons, had luffed about the sentinel, and was
standing up the bay, close-hauled.

The sleeping city awakened by enchantment.  Natives
appeared upon all sides, hailing each other with the
magic cry "Ehippy"--ship; the Queen stepped forth on
her verandah, shading her eyes under a hand that was a
miracle of the fine art of tattooing; the commandant
broke from his domestic convicts and ran into the
residency for his glass; the harbour-master, who was
also the gaoler, came speeding down the Prison Hill;
the seventeen brown Kanakas and the French boatswain's
mate, that make up the complement of the war-schooner,
crowded on the forward deck; and the various English,
Americans, Germans, Poles, Corsicans, and Scots--the
merchants and the clerks of Tai-o-hae--deserted their
places of business, and gathered, according to
invariable custom, on the road before the club.

So quickly did these dozen whites collect, so short are
the distances in Tai-o-hae, that they were already
exchanging guesses as to the nationality and business
of the strange vessel, before she had gone about upon
her second board towards the anchorage.  A moment
after, English colours were broken out at the main
truck.

"I told you she was a Johnny Bull--knew it by her
headsails," said an evergreen old salt, still qualified
(if he could anywhere have found an owner unacquainted
with his story) to adorn another quarter-deck and lose
another ship.

"She has American lines, anyway," said the astute Scots
engineer of the gin-mill; "it's my belief she's a
yacht."

"That's it," said the old salt, "a yacht! look at her
davits, and the boat over the stern."

"A yacht in your eye!" said a Glasgow voice.  "Look at
her red ensign! A yacht! not much she isn't!"

"You can close the store, anyway, Tom," observed a
gentlemanly German.  "BON JOUR, MON PRINCE!" he
added, as a dark, intelligent native cantered by on a
neat chestnut.  "VOUS ALLEZ BOIRE UN VERRE DE
BIERE?"

But Prince Stanila Moanatini, the only reasonably busy
human creature on the island, was riding hot-spur to
view this morning's landslip on the mountain road; the
sun already visibly declined; night was imminent; and
if he would avoid the perils of darkness and precipice,
and the fear of the dead, the haunters of the jungle,
he must for once decline a hospitable invitation.  Even
had he been minded to alight, it presently appeared
there would be difficulty as to the refreshment
offered.

"Beer!" cried the Glasgow voice.  "No such a thing; I
tell you there's only eight bottles in the club! Here's
the first time I've seen British colours in this port!
and the man that sails under them has got to drink that
beer."

The proposal struck the public mind as fair, though far
from cheering; for some time back, indeed, the very
name of beer had been a sound of sorrow in the club,
and the evenings had passed in dolorous computation.

"Here is Havens," said one, as if welcoming a fresh
topic.--"What do you think of her, Havens?"

"I don't think," replied Havens, a tall, bland, cool-
looking, leisurely Englishman, attired in spotless
duck, and deliberately dealing with a cigarette.  "I
may say I know.  She's consigned to me from Auckland by
Donald and Edenborough.  I am on my way aboard."

"What ship is she?" asked the ancient mariner.

"Haven't an idea," returned Havens.  "Some tramp they
have chartered."

With that he placidly resumed his walk, and was soon
seated in the stern-sheets of a whaleboat manned by
uproarious Kanakas, himself daintily perched out of the
way of the least maculation, giving his commands in an
unobtrusive, dinner-table tone of voice, and sweeping
neatly enough alongside the schooner.

A weather-beaten captain received him at the gangway.

"You are consigned to us, I think," said he.  "I am Mr.
Havens."

"That is right, sir," replied the captain, shaking
hands.  "You will find the owner, Mr. Dodd, below.
Mind the fresh paint on the house."

Havens stepped along the alley-way, and descended the
ladder into the main cabin.

"Mr. Dodd, I believe," said he, addressing a smallish,
bearded gentleman, who sat writing at the table.--
"Why," he cried, "it isn't Loudon Dodd?"

"Myself, my dear fellow," replied Mr. Dodd, springing
to his feet with companionable alacrity.  "I had a
half-hope it might be you, when I found your name on
the papers.  Well, there's no change in you; still the
same placid, fresh-looking Britisher."

"I can't return the compliment; for you seem to have
become a Britisher yourself," said Havens.

"I promise you, I am quite unchanged," returned Dodd.
"The red tablecloth at the top of the stick is not my
flag; it's my partner's.  He is not dead, but sleepeth.
There he is," he added, pointing to a bust which formed
one of the numerous unexpected ornaments of that
unusual cabin.

Havens politely studied it.  "A fine bust," said he;
"and a very nice-looking fellow."

"Yes; he's a good fellow," said Dodd.  "He runs me now.
It's all his money."

"He doesn't seem to be particularly short of it," added
the other, peering with growing wonder round the cabin.

"His money--my taste," said Dodd.  "The black walnut
bookshelves are old English; the books all mine--mostly
Renaissance French.  You should see how the beach-
combers wilt away when they go round them, looking for
a change of seaside library novels.  The mirrors are
genuine Venice; that's a good piece in the corner.  The
daubs are mine--and his; the mudding mine."

"Mudding? What is that?" asked Havens.

"These bronzes," replied Dodd.  "I began life as a
sculptor."

"Yes; I remember something about that," said the other.
"I think, too, you said you were interested in
Californian real estate."

"Surely I never went so far as that," said Dodd.
"Interested? I guess not.  Involved, perhaps.  I was
born an artist; I never took an interest in anything
but art.  If I were to pile up this old schooner to-
morrow," he added, "I declare I believe I would try the
thing again!"

"Insured?" inquired Havens.

"Yes," responded Dodd.  "There's some fool in 'Frisco
who insures us, and comes down like a wolf on the fold
on the profits; but we'll get even with him some day."

"Well, I suppose it's all right about the cargo," said
Havens.

"O, I suppose so!" replied Dodd.  "Shall we go into the
papers?"

"We'll have all to-morrow, you know," said Havens; "and
they'll be rather expecting you at the club.  C'EST
L'HEURE DE L'ABSINTHE.  Of course, Loudon, you'll dine
with me later on?"

Mr. Dodd signified his acquiescence; drew on his white
coat, not without a trifling difficulty, for he was a
man of middle age, and well-to-do; arranged his beard
and moustaches at one of the Venetian mirrors; and,
taking a broad felt hat, led the way through the trade-
room into the ship's waist.

The stern boat was waiting alongside--a boat of an
elegant model, with cushions and polished hard-wood
fittings.

"You steer," observed Loudon.  "You know the best place
to land."

"I never like to steer another man's boat," replied
Havens.

"Call it my partner's, and cry quits," returned Loudon,
getting nonchalantly down the side.

Havens followed and took the yoke lines without further
protest.

"I am sure I don't know how you make this pay," he
said.  "To begin with, she is too big for the trade, to
my taste; and then you carry so much style."

"I don't know that she does pay," returned Loudon.

"I never pretend to be a business man.  My partner
appears happy; and the money is all his, as I told you;
I only bring the want of business habits."

"You rather like the berth, I suppose?" suggested
Havens.

"Yes," said Loudon; "it seems odd, but I rather do."

While they were yet on board, the sun had dipped; the
sunset gun (a rifle) had cracked from the war-schooner,
and the colours had been handed down.  Dusk was
deepening as they came ashore; and the CERCLE
INTERNATIONAL (as the club is officially and
significantly named) began to shine, from under its low
verandahs, with the light of many lamps.  The good
hours of the twenty-four drew on; the hateful,
poisonous day-fly of Nukahiva was beginning to desist
from its activity; the land-breeze came in refreshing
draughts; and the club-men gathered together for the
hour of absinthe.  To the commandant himself, to the
man whom he was then contending with at billiards--a
trader from the next island, honorary member of the
club, and once carpenter's mate on board a Yankee war-
ship--to the doctor of the port, to the Brigadier of
Gendarmerie, to the opium-farmer, and to all the white
men whom the tide of commerce, or the chances of
shipwreck and desertion, had stranded on the beach of
Tai-o-hae, Mr. Loudon Dodd was formally presented; by
all (since he was a man of pleasing exterior, smooth
ways, and an unexceptionable flow of talk, whether in
French or English) he was excellently well received;
and presently, with one of the last eight bottles of
beer on a table at his elbow, found himself the rather
silent centre-piece of a voluble group on the verandah.

Talk in the South Seas is all upon one pattern; it is a
wide ocean, indeed, but a narrow world: you shall never
talk long and not hear the name of Bully Hayes, a naval
hero whose exploits and deserved extinction left Europe
cold; commerce will be touched on, copra, shell,
perhaps cotton or fungus; but in a far-away, dilettante
fashion, as by men not deeply interested; through all,
the names of schooners and their captains will keep
coming and going, thick as may-flies; and news of the
last shipwreck will be placidly exchanged and debated.
To a stranger, this conversation will at first seem
scarcely brilliant; but he will soon catch the tone;
and by the time he shall have moved a year or so in the
island world, and come across a good number of the
schooners, so that every captain's name calls up a
figure in pyjamas or white duck, and becomes used to a
certain laxity of moral tone which prevails (as in
memory of Mr. Hayes) on smuggling, ship-scuttling,
barratry, piracy, the labour trade, and other kindred
fields of human activity, he will find Polynesia no
less amusing and no less instructive than Pall Mall or
Paris.

Mr. Loudon Dodd, though he was new to the group of the
Marquesas, was already an old, salted trader; he knew
the ships and the captains; he had assisted, in other
islands, at the first steps of some career of which he
now heard the culmination, or (VICE VERSA) he had
brought with him from further south the end of some
story which had begun in Tai-o-hae.  Among other matter
of interest, like other arrivals in the South Seas, he
had a wreck to announce.  The JOHN T. RICHARDS, it
appeared, had met the fate of other island schooners.

"Dickinson piled her up on Palmerston Island," Dodd
announced.

"Who were the owners?" inquired one of the club-men.

"O, the usual parties!" returned Loudon.  "Capsicum and
Co."

A smile and a glance of intelligence went round the
group; and perhaps Loudon gave voice to the general
sentiment by remarking--

"Talk of good business! I know nothing better than a
schooner, a competent captain, and a sound reliable
reef."

"Good business! There's no such a thing!" said the
Glasgow man.  "Nobody makes anything but the
missionaries--dash it!"

"I don't know," said another; "there's a good deal in
opium.

"It's a good job to strike a tabooed pearl-island--say,
about the fourth year," remarked a third, "skim the
whole lagoon on the sly, and up stick and away before
the French get wind of you."

"A pig nokket of cold is good," observed a German.

"There's something in wrecks, too," said Havens.  "Look
at that man in Honolulu, and the ship that went ashore
on Waikiki Reef; it was blowing a kona, hard; and she
began to break up as soon as she touched.  Lloyd's
agent had her sold inside an hour; and before dark,
when she went to pieces in earnest, the man that bought
her had feathered his nest.  Three more hours of
daylight, and he might have retired from business.  As
it was, he built a house on Beretania Street, and
called it after the ship."

"Yes, there's something in wrecks sometimes," said the
Glasgow voice; "but not often."

"As a general rule, there's deuced little in anything,"
said Havens.

"Well, I believe that's a Christian fact," cried the
other.  "What I want is a secret, get hold of a rich
man by the right place, and make him squeal."

"I suppose you know it's not thought to be the ticket,"
returned Havens.

"I don't care for that; it's good enough for me," cried
the man from Glasgow, stoutly.  "The only devil of it
is, a fellow can never find a secret in a place like
the South Seas: only in London and Paris."

"M'Gibbon's been reading some dime novel, I suppose,"
said one club-man.

"He's been reading AURORA FLOYD," remarked another.

"And what if I have?" cried M'Gibbon.  "It's all true.
Look at the newspapers! It's just your confounded
ignorance that sets you snickering.  I tell you, it's
as much a trade as underwriting, and a dashed sight
more honest."

The sudden acrimony of these remarks called Loudon (who
was a man of peace) from his reserve.  "It's rather
singular," said he, "but I seem to have practised about
all these means of livelihood."

"Tit you effer find a nokket?" inquired the
inarticulate German, eagerly.

"No.  I have been most kinds of fool in my time,"
returned Loudon, "but not the gold-digging variety.
Every man has a sane spot somewhere."

"Well, then," suggested some one, "did you ever smuggle
opium?"

"Yes, I did," said Loudon.

"Was there money in that?"

"All the way," responded Loudon.

"And perhaps you bought a wreck?" asked another.

"Yes, sir," said Loudon.

"How did that pan out?" pursued the questioner.

"Well, mine was a peculiar kind of wreck," replied
Loudon.  "I don't know, on the whole, that I can
recommend that branch of industry."

"Did she break up?" asked some one.

"I guess it was rather I that broke down," says Loudon.
"Head not big enough."

"Ever try the blackmail?" inquired Havens.

"Simple as you see me sitting here!" responded Dodd.

"Good business?"

"Well, I'm not a lucky man, you see," returned the
stranger.  "It ought to have been good."

"You had a secret?" asked the Glasgow man.

"As big as the State of Texas."

"And the other man was rich?"

"He wasn't exactly Jay Gould, but I guess he could buy
these islands if he wanted."

"Why, what was wrong, then? Couldn't you get hands on
him?"

"It took time, but I had him cornered at last; and
then----

"What then?"

"The speculation turned bottom up.  I became the man's
bosom friend."

"The deuce you did!"

"He couldn't have been particular, you mean?" asked
Dodd pleasantly.  "Well, no; he's a man of rather large
sympathies."

"If you're done talking nonsense, Loudon," said Havens,
"let's be getting to my place for dinner."

Outside, the night was full of the roaring of the surf.
Scattered lights glowed in the green thicket.  Native
women came by twos and threes out of the darkness,
smiled and ogled the two whites, perhaps wooed them
with a strain of laughter, and went by again,
bequeathing to the air a heady perfume of palm-oil and
frangipani blossom.  From the club to Mr. Havens's
residence was but a step or two, and to any dweller in
Europe they must have seemed steps in fairyland.  If
such an one could but have followed our two friends
into the wide-verandahed house, sat down with them in
the cool trellised room, where the wine shone on the
lamp-lighted table-cloth; tasted of their exotic food--
the raw fish, the bread-fruit, the cooked bananas, the
roast pig served with the inimitable miti, and that
king of delicacies, palm-tree salad; seen and heard by
fits and starts, now peering round the corner of the
door, now railing within against invisible assistants,
a certain comely young native lady in a sacque, who
seemed too modest to be a member of the family, and too
imperious to be less; and then if such an one were
whisked again through space to Upper Tooting, or
wherever else he honoured the domestic gods, "I have
had a dream," I think he would say, as he sat up,
rubbing his eyes, in the familiar chimney-corner chair,
"I have had a dream of a place, and I declare I believe
it must be heaven." But to Dodd and his entertainer,
all this amenity of the tropic night, and all these
dainties of the island table, were grown things of
custom; and they fell to meat like men who were hungry,
and drifted into idle talk like men who were a trifle
bored.

The scene in the club was referred to.

"I never heard you talk so much nonsense, Loudon," said
the host.

"Well, it seemed to me there was sulphur in the air, so
I talked for talking," returned the other.  "But it was
none of it nonsense."

"Do you mean to say it was true?" cried Havens--"that
about the opium and the wreck, and the blackmailing,
and the man who became your friend?"

"Every last word of it," said Loudon.

"You seem to have been seeing life," returned the
other.

"Yes, it's a queer yarn," said his friend; "if you
think you would like, I'll tell it you."

Here follows the yarn of Loudon Dodd, not as he told it
to his friend, but as he subsequently wrote it.

                       THE YARN
                           
                           
                           
                       CHAPTER I
                           
                           
             A SOUND COMMERCIAL EDUCATION

THE beginning of this yarn is my poor father's
character.  There never was a better man, nor a
handsomer, nor (in my view) a more unhappy--unhappy in
his business, in his pleasures, in his place of
residence, and (I am sorry to say it) in his son.  He
had begun life as a land-surveyor, soon became
interested in real estate, branched off into many other
speculations, and had the name of one of the smartest
men in the State of Muskegon.  "Dodd has a big head,"
people used to say; but I was never so sure of his
capacity.  His luck, at least, was beyond doubt for
long; his assiduity, always.  He fought in that daily
battle of money-grubbing, with a kind of sad-eyed
loyalty like a martyr's; rose early, ate fast, came
home dispirited and over-weary, even from success;
grudged himself all pleasure, if his nature was capable
of taking any, which I sometimes wondered; and laid
out, upon some deal in wheat or corner in aluminium,
the essence of which was little better than highway
robbery, treasures of conscientiousness and self-
denial.

Unluckily, I never cared a cent for anything but art,
and never shall.  My idea of man's chief end was to
enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a
fairly good time myself while doing so.  I do not think
I mentioned that second part, which is the only one I
have managed to carry out; but my father must have
suspected the suppression, for he branded the whole
affair as self-indulgence.

"Well," I remember crying once, "and what is your life?
You are only trying to get money, and to get it from
other people at that."

He sighed bitterly (which was very much his habit), and
shook his poor head at me.

"Ah, Loudon, Loudon!" said he, "you boys think
yourselves very smart.  But, struggle as you please, a
man has to work in this world.  He must be an honest
man or a thief, Loudon."

You can see for yourself how vain it was to argue with
my father.  The despair that seized upon me after such
an interview was, besides, embittered by remorse; for I
was at times petulant, but he invariably gentle; and I
was fighting, after all, for my own liberty and
pleasure, he singly for what he thought to be my good.
And all the time he never despaired.  "There is good
stuff in you, Loudon," he would say; "there is the
right stuff in you.  Blood will tell, and you will come
right in time.  I am not afraid my boy will ever
disgrace me; I am only vexed he should sometimes talk
nonsense." And then he would pat my shoulder or my hand
with a kind of motherly way he had, very affecting in a
man so strong and beautiful.

As soon as I had graduated from the high school, he
packed me off to the Muskegon Commercial Academy.  You
are a foreigner, and you will have a difficulty in
accepting the reality of this seat of education.  I
assure you before I begin that I am wholly serious.
The place really existed, possibly exists to-day: we
were proud of it in the State, as something
exceptionally nineteenth-century and civilised; and my
father, when he saw me to the cars, no doubt considered
he was putting me in a straight line for the Presidency
and the New Jerusalem.

"Loudon," said he, "I am now giving you a chance that
Julius Caesar could not have given to his son--a chance
to see life as it is, before your own turn comes to
start in earnest.  Avoid rash speculation, try to
behave like a gentleman; and if you will take my
advice, confine yourself to a safe, conservative
business in railroads.  Breadstuffs are tempting, but
very dangerous; I would not try breadstuffs at your
time of life; but you may feel your way a little in
other commodities.  Take a pride to keep your books
posted, and never throw good money after bad.  There,
my dear boy, kiss me good-bye; and never forget that
you are an only chick, and that your dad watches your
career with fond suspense."

The commercial college was a fine, roomy establishment,
pleasantly situate among woods.  The air was healthy,
the food excellent, the premium high.  Electric wires
connected it (to use the words of the prospectus) with
"the various world centres." The reading-room was well
supplied with "commercial organs." The talk was that of
Wall Street; and the pupils (from fifty to a hundred
lads) were principally engaged in rooking or trying to
rook one another for nominal sums in what was called
"college paper." We had class hours, indeed, in the
morning, when we studied German, French, book-keeping,
and the like goodly matters; but the bulk of our day
and the gist of the education centred in the exchange,
where we were taught to gamble in produce and
securities.  Since not one of the participants
possessed a bushel of wheat or a dollar's worth of
stock, legitimate business was of course impossible
from the beginning.  It was cold-drawn gambling,
without colour or disguise.  Just that which is the
impediment and destruction of all genuine commercial
enterprise, just that we were taught with every luxury
of stage effect.  Our simulacrum of a market was ruled
by the real markets outside, so that we might
experience the course and vicissitude of prices.  We
must keep books, and our ledgers were overhauled at the
month's end by the principal or his assistants.  To add
a spice of verisimilitude, "college paper" (like poker
chips) had an actual marketable value.  It was bought
for each pupil by anxious parents and guardians at the
rate of one cent for the dollar.  The same pupil, when
his education was complete, resold, at the same figure,
so much as was left him to the college; and even in the
midst of his curriculum, a successful operator would
sometimes realise a proportion of his holding, and
stand a supper on the sly in the neighbouring hamlet.
In short, if there was ever a worse education, it must
have been in that academy where Oliver met Charles
Bates.

When I was first guided into the exchange to have my
desk pointed out by one of the assistant teachers, I
was overwhelmed by the clamour and confusion.  Certain
blackboards at the other end of the building were
covered with figures continually replaced.  As each new
set appeared, the pupils swayed to and fro, and roared
out aloud with a formidable and to me quite meaningless
vociferation; leaping at the same time upon the desks
and benches, signalling with arms and heads, and
scribbling briskly in note-books.  I thought I had
never beheld a scene more disagreeable; and when I
considered that the whole traffic was illusory, and all
the money then upon the market would scarce have
sufficed to buy a pair of skates, I was at first
astonished, although not for long.  Indeed, I had no
sooner called to mind how grown-up men and women of
considerable estate will lose their temper about
halfpenny points, than (making an immediate allowance
for my fellow-students) I transferred the whole of my
astonishment to the assistant teacher, who--poor
gentleman--had quite forgot to show me to my desk, and
stood in the midst of this hurly-burly, absorbed and
seemingly transported.

"Look, look," he shouted in my ear; "a falling market!
The bears have had it all their own way since
yesterday."

"It can't matter," I replied, making him hear with
difficulty, for I was unused to speak in such a babel,
"since it is all fun."

"True," said he; "and you must always bear in mind that
the real profit is in the book-keeping.  I trust, Dodd,
to be able to congratulate you upon your books.  You
are to start in with ten thousand dollars of college
paper, a very liberal figure, which should see you
through the whole curriculum, if you keep to a safe,
conservative business....  Why, what's that?" he broke
off, once more attracted by the changing figures on the
board.  "Seven, four, three! Dodd, you are in luck:
this is the most spirited rally we have had this term.
And to think that the same scene is now transpiring in
New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and rival business
centres! For two cents, I would try a flutter with the
boys myself," he cried, rubbing his hands; "only it's
against the regulations."

"What would you do, sir?" I asked.

"Do?" he cried, with glittering eyes.  "Buy for all I
was worth!"

"Would that be a safe, conservative business?" I
inquired, as innocent as a lamb.

He looked daggers at me.  "See that sandy-haired man in
glasses?" he asked, as if to change the subject.
"That's Billson, our most prominent undergraduate.  We
build confidently on Billson's future.  You could not
do better, Dodd, than follow Billson."

Presently after, in the midst of a still growing
tumult, the figures coming and going more busily than
ever on the board, and the hall resounding like
Pandemonium with the howls of operators, the assistant
teacher left me to my own resources at my desk.  The
next boy was posting up his ledger, figuring his
morning's loss, as I discovered later on; and from this
ungenial task he was readily diverted by the sight of a
new face.

"Say, Freshman," he said, "what's your name? What? Son
of Big Head Dodd? What's your figure? Ten thousand? O,
you're away up! What a soft-headed clam you must be to
touch your books!"

I asked him what else I could do, since the books were
to be examined once a month.

"Why, you galoot, you get a clerk!" cries he.  "One of
our dead beats--that's all they're here for.  If you're
a successful operator, you need never do a stroke of
work in this old college."

The noise had now become deafening; and my new friend,
telling me that some one had certainly "gone down,"
that he must know the news, and that he would bring me
a clerk when he returned, buttoned his coat and plunged
into the tossing throng.  It proved that he was right:
some one had gone down; a prince had fallen in Israel;
the corner in lard had proved fatal to the mighty; and
the clerk who was brought back to keep my books, spare
me all work, and get all my share of the education, at
a thousand dollars a month, college paper (ten dollars,
United States currency) was no other than the prominent
Billson whom I could do no better than follow.  The
poor lad was very unhappy.  It's the only good thing I
have to say for Muskegon Commercial College, that we
were all, even the small fry, deeply mortified to be
posted as defaulters; and the collapse of a merchant
prince like Billson, who had ridden pretty high in his
days of prosperity, was, of course, particularly hard
to bear.  But the spirit of make-believe conquered even
the bitterness of recent shame; and my clerk took his
orders, and fell to his new duties, with decorum and
civility.

Such were my first impressions in this absurd place of
education; and, to be frank, they were far from
disagreeable.  As long as I was rich, my evenings and
afternoons would be my own; the clerk must keep my
books, the clerk could do the jostling and bawling in
the exchange; and I could turn my mind to landscape-
painting and Balzac's novels, which were then my two
pre-occupations.  To remain rich, then, became my
problem; or, in other words, to do a safe, conservative
line of business.  I am looking for that line still;
and I believe the nearest thing to it in this imperfect
world is the sort of speculation sometimes insidiously
proposed to childhood, in the formula, "Heads I win;
tails you lose." Mindful of my father's parting words,
I turned my attention timidly to railroads; and for a
month or so maintained a position of inglorious
security, dealing for small amounts in the most inert
stocks, and bearing (as best I could) the scorn of my
hired clerk.  One day I had ventured a little further
by way of experiment; and, in the sure expectation they
would continue to go down, sold several thousand
dollars of Pan-Handle Preference (I think it was).  I
had no sooner made this venture than some fools in New
York began to bull the market; Pan-Handles rose like a
balloon; and in the inside of half an hour I saw my
position compromised.  Blood will tell, as my father
said; and I stuck to it gallantly: all afternoon I
continued selling that infernal stock, all afternoon it
continued skying.  I suppose I had come (a frail
cockle-shell) athwart the hawse of Jay Gould; and,
indeed, I think I remember that this vagary in the
market proved subsequently to be the first move in a
considerable deal.  That evening, at least, the name of
H. Loudon Dodd held the first rank in our collegiate
gazette, and I and Billson (once more thrown upon the
world) were competing for the same clerkship.  The
present object takes the present eye.  My disaster, for
the moment, was the more conspicuous; and it was I that
got the situation.  So, you see, even in Muskegon
Commercial College there were lessons to be learned.

For my own part, I cared very little whether I lost or
won at a game so random, so complex, and so dull; but
it was sorry news to write to my poor father, and I
employed all the resources of my eloquence.  I told him
(what was the truth) that the successful boys had none
of the education; so that, if he wished me to learn, he
should rejoice at my misfortune.  I went on (not very
consistently) to beg him to set me up again, when I
would solemnly promise to do a safe business in
reliable railroads.  Lastly (becoming somewhat carried
away), I assured him I was totally unfit for business,
and implored him to take me away from this abominable
place, and let me go to Paris to study art.  He
answered briefly, gently, and sadly, telling me the
vacation was near at hand, when we could talk things
over.

When the time came, he met me at the depot, and I was
shocked to see him looking older.  He seemed to have no
thought but to console me and restore (what he supposed
I had lost) my courage.  I must not be down-hearted;
many of the best men had made a failure in the
beginning.  I told him I had no head for business, and
his kind face darkened.  "You must not say that,
Loudon," he replied; "I will never believe my son to be
a coward."

"But I don't like it," I pleaded.  "It hasn't got any
interest for me, and art has.  I know I could do more
in art," and I reminded him that a successful painter
gains large sums; that a picture of Meissonier's would
sell for many thousand dollars.

"And do you think, Loudon," he replied, "that a man who
can paint a thousand-dollar picture has not grit enough
to keep his end up in the stock market? No, sir; this
Mason (of whom you speak) or our own American
Bierstadt--if you were to put them down in a wheat-pit
to-morrow, they would show their mettle.  Come, Loudon,
my dear; heaven knows I have no thought but your own
good, and I will offer you a bargain.  I start you
again next term with ten thousand dollars; show
yourself a man, and double it, and then (if you still
wish to go to Paris, which I know you won't) I'll let
you go.  But to let you run away as if you were
whipped, is what I am too proud to do."

My heart leaped at this proposal, and then sank again.
It seemed easier to paint a Meissonier on the spot than
to win ten thousand dollars on that mimic stock
exchange.  Nor could I help reflecting on the
singularity of such a test for a man's capacity to be a
painter.  I ventured even to comment on this.

He sighed deeply.  "You forget, my dear," said he, "I
am a judge of the one, and not of the other.  You might
have the genius of Bierstadt himself, and I would be
none the wiser."

"And then," I continued, "it's scarcely fair.  The
other boys are helped by their people, who telegraph
and give them pointers.  There's Jim Costello, who
never budges without a word from his father in New
York.  And then, don't you see, if anybody is to win,
somebody must lose?"

"I'll keep you posted," cried my father, with unusual
animation; "I did not know it was allowed.  I'll wire
you in the office cipher, and we'll make it a kind of
partnership business, Loudon:--Dodd and Son, eh?" and
he patted my shoulder and repeated, "Dodd and Son, Dodd
and Son," with the kindliest amusement.

If my father was to give me pointers, and the
commercial college was to be a stepping-stone to Paris,
I could look my future in the face.  The old boy, too,
was so pleased at the idea of our association in this
foolery, that he immediately plucked up spirit.  Thus
it befell that those who had met at the depot like a
pair of mutes, sat down to table with holiday faces.

And now I have to introduce a new character that never
said a word nor wagged a finger, and yet shaped my
whole subsequent career.  You have crossed the States,
so that in all likelihood you have seen the head of it,
parcel-gilt and curiously fluted, rising among trees
from a wide plain; for this new character was no other
than the State capitol of Muskegon, then first
projected.  My father had embraced the idea with a
mixture of patriotism and commercial greed, both
perfectly genuine.  He was of all the committees, he
had subscribed a great deal of money, and he was making
arrangements to have a finger in most of the contracts.
Competitive plans had been sent in; at the time of my
return from college my father was deep in their
consideration; and as the idea entirely occupied his
mind, the first evening did not pass away before he had
called me into council.  Here was a subject at last
into which I could throw myself with pleasurable zeal.
Architecture was new to me, indeed; but it was at least
an art; and for all the arts I had a taste naturally
classical, and that capacity to take delighted pains
which some famous idiot has supposed to be synonymous
with genius.  I threw myself headlong into my father's
work, acquainted myself with all the plans, their
merits and defects, read besides in special books, made
myself a master of the theory of strains, studied the
current prices of materials, and (in one word)
"devilled" the whole business so thoroughly, that when
the plans came up for consideration, Big Head Dodd was
supposed to have earned fresh laurels.  His arguments
carried the day, his choice was approved by the
committee, and I had the anonymous satisfaction to know
that arguments and choice were wholly mine.  In the re-
casting of the plan which followed, my part was even
larger; for I designed and cast with my own hand a hot-
air grating for the offices, which had the luck or
merit to be accepted.  The energy and aptitude which I
displayed throughout delighted and surprised my father,
and I believe, although I say it, whose tongue should
be tied, that they alone prevented Muskegon capitol
from being the eyesore of my native State.

Altogether, I was in a cheery frame of mind when I
returned to the commercial college; and my earlier
operations were crowned with a full measure of success.
My father wrote and wired to me continually.  "You are
to exercise your own judgment, Loudon," he would say.
"All that I do is to give you the figures; but whatever
operation you take up must be upon your own
responsibility, and whatever you earn will be entirely
due to your own dash and forethought." For all that, it
was always clear what he intended me to do, and I was
always careful to do it.  Inside of a month I was at
the head of seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars,
college paper.  And here I fell a victim to one of the
vices of the system.  The paper (I have already
explained) had a real value of one per cent; and cost,
and could be sold for, currency.  Unsuccessful
speculators were thus always selling clothes, books,
banjos, and sleeve-links, in order to pay their
differences; the successful, on the other hand, were
often tempted to realise, and enjoy some return upon
their profits.  Now I wanted thirty dollars' worth of
artist truck, for I was always sketching in the woods;
my allowance was for the time exhausted; I had begun to
regard the exchange (with my father's help) as a place
where money was to be got for stooping; and in an evil
hour I realised three thousand dollars of the college
paper and bought my easel.

It was a Wednesday morning when the things arrived, and
set me in the seventh heaven of satisfaction.  My
father (for I can scarcely say myself) was trying at
this time a "straddle" in wheat between Chicago and New
York; the operation so called is, as you know, one of
the most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board
of finance.  On the Thursday, luck began to turn
against my father's calculations; and by the Friday
evening I was posted on the boards as a defaulter for
the second time.  Here was a rude blow: my father would
have taken it ill enough in any case; for however much
a man may resent the incapacity of an only son, he will
feel his own more sensibly.  But it chanced that, in
our bitter cup of failure, there was one ingredient
that might truly be called poisonous.  He had been
keeping the run of my position; he missed the three
thousand dollars, paper; and in his view, I had stolen
thirty dollars, currency.  It was an extreme view
perhaps; but in some senses, it was just: and my
father, although (to my judgment) quite reckless of
honesty in the essence of his operations, was the soul
of honour as to their details.  I had one grieved
letter from him, dignified and tender; and during the
rest of that wretched term, working as a clerk, selling
my clothes and sketches to make futile speculations, my
dream of Paris quite vanished.  I was cheered by no
word of kindness and helped by no hint of counsel from
my father.

All the time he was no doubt thinking of little else
but his son, and what to do with him.  I believe he had
been really appalled by what he regarded as my laxity
of principle, and began to think it might be well to
preserve me from temptation; the architect of the
capitol had, besides, spoken obligingly of my design;
and while he was thus hanging between two minds,
Fortune suddenly stepped in, and Muskegon State capitol
reversed my destiny.

"Loudon," said my father, as he met me at the depot,
with a smiling countenance, "if you were to go to
Paris, how long would it take you to become an
experienced sculptor?"

"How do you mean, father?" I cried--'experienced?"

"A man that could be intrusted with the highest
styles," he answered; "the nude, for instance; and the
patriotic and emblematical styles."

"It might take three years," I replied.

"You think Paris necessary?" he asked.  "There are
great advantages in our own country; and that man
Prodgers appears to be a very clever sculptor, though I
suppose he stands too high to go around giving
lessons."

"Paris is the only place," I assured him.

"Well, I think myself it will sound better," he
admitted.  "A Young Man, a Native of this State, Son of
a Leading Citizen, Studies Prosecuted under the Most
Experienced Masters in Paris," he added relishingly.

"But, my dear dad, what is it all about?" I
interrupted.  "I never even dreamed of being a
sculptor."

"Well, here it is," said he.  "I took up the statuary
contract on our new capitol; I took it up at first as a
deal; and then it occurred to me it would be better to
keep it in the family.  It meets your idea; there's
considerable money in the thing; and it's patriotic.
So, if you say the word, you shall go to Paris, and
come back in three years to decorate the capitol of
your native State.  It's a big chance for you, Loudon;
and I'll tell you what--every dollar you earn, I'll put
another alongside of it.  But the sooner you go, and
the harder you work, the better; for if the first half-
dozen statues aren't in a line with public taste in
Muskegon, there will be trouble."

                      CHAPTER II
                           
                           
                    ROUSSILLON WINE

MY mother's family was Scottish, and it was judged
fitting I should pay a visit, on my way Paris-ward to
my uncle Adam Loudon, a wealthy retired grocer of
Edinburgh.  He was very stiff and very ironical; he fed
me well, lodged me sumptuously, and seemed to take it
out of me all the time, cent. per cent., in secret
entertainment which caused his spectacles to glitter
and his mouth to twitch.  The ground of this ill-
suppressed mirth (as well as I could make out) was
simply the fact that I was an American.  "Well," he
would say, drawing out the word to infinity "and I
suppose now in your country things will be so-and-so."
And the whole group of my cousins would titter
joyously.  Repeated receptions of this sort must be at
the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great
American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into
saying that my friends went naked in the summer months,
and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in
Muskegon was decorated with scalps.  I cannot say that
these flights had any great success; they seemed to
awaken little more surprise than the fact that my
father was a Republican, or that I had been taught in
school to spell COLOUR without the U.  If I had
told them (what was, after all, the truth) that my
father had paid a considerable annual sum to have me
brought up in a gambling-hell, the tittering and
grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have
been excused.

I cannot deny but I was sometimes tempted to knock my
uncle Adam down; and indeed I believe it must have come
to a rupture at last, if they had not given a dinner-
party at which I was the lion.  On this occasion I
learned (to my surprise and relief) that the incivility
to which I had been subjected was a matter for the
family circle, and might be regarded almost in the
light of an endearment.  To strangers I was presented
with consideration; and the account given of "my
American brother-in-law, poor Janie's man, James K.
Dodd, the well-known millionaire of Muskegon," was
calculated to enlarge the heart of a proud son.

An aged assistant of my grandfather's, a pleasant,
humble creature with a taste for whisky, was at first
deputed to be my guide about the city.  With this
harmless but hardly aristocratic companion I went to
Arthur's Seat and the Calton Hill, heard the band play
in Princes Street Gardens, inspected the regalia and
the blood of Rizzio, and fell in love with the great
castle on its cliff, the innumerable spires of
churches, the stately buildings, the broad prospects,
and those narrow and crowded lanes of the old town
where my ancestors had lived and died in the days
before Columbus.

But there was another curiosity that interested me more
deeply--my grandfather, Alexander Loudon.  In his time
the old gentleman had been a working mason, and had
risen from the ranks--more, I think, by shrewdness than
by merit.  In his appearance, speech, and manners, he
bore broad marks of his origin, which were gall and
wormwood to my uncle Adam.  His nails, in spite of
anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous
mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and
wrinkles, like a ploughman's Sunday coat; his accent
was rude, broad, and dragging.  Take him at his best,
and even when he could be induced to hold his tongue,
his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with
his open-air wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered
hands, and the cheerful craftiness of his expression,
advertised the whole gang of us for a self-made family.
My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle, but there
was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the
stonemason in the chimney-corner.

That is one advantage of being an American.  It never
occurred to me to be ashamed of my grandfather, and the
old gentleman was quick to mark the difference.  He
held my mother in tender memory, perhaps because he was
in the habit of daily contrasting her with Uncle Adam,
whom he detested to the point of frenzy; and he set
down to inheritance from his favourite my own becoming
treatment of himself.  On our walks abroad, which soon
became daily, he would sometimes (after duly warning me
to keep the matter dark from "Aadam") skulk into some
old familiar pot-house, and there (if he had the luck
to encounter any of his veteran cronies) he would
present me to the company with manifest pride, casting
at the same time a covert slur on the rest of his
descendants.  "This is my Jeannie's yin," he would say.
"He's a fine fallow, him." The purpose of our
excursions was not to seek antiquities or to enjoy
famous prospects, but to visit one after another a
series of doleful suburbs, for which it was the old
gentleman's chief claim to renown that he had been the
sole contractor, and too often the architect besides.
I have rarely seen a more shocking exhibition: the
brick seemed to be blushing in the walls, and the
slates on the roof to have turned pale with shame; but
I was careful not to communicate these impressions to
the aged artificer at my side; and when he would direct
my attention to some fresh monstrosity--perhaps with
the comment, "There's an idee of mine's; it's cheap and
tasty, and had a graand run; the idee was soon stole,
and there's whole deestricts near Glesgie with the
goathic addeetion and that plunth," I would civilly
make haste to admire and (what I found particularly
delighted him) to inquire into the cost of each
adornment.  It will be conceived that Muskegon capitol
was a frequent and a welcome ground of talk.  I drew
him all the plans from memory; and he, with the aid of
a narrow volume full of figures and tables, which
answered (I believe) to the name of Molesworth, and was
his constant pocket-companion, would draw up rough
estimates and make imaginary offers on the various
contracts.  Our Muskegon builders he pronounced a pack
of cormorants; and the congenial subject, together with
my knowledge of architectural terms, the theory of
strains, and the prices of materials in the States,
formed a strong bond of union between what might have
been otherwise an ill-assorted pair, and led my
grandfather to pronounce me, with emphasis, "a real
intalligent kind of a chield." Thus a second time, as
you will presently see, the capitol of my native State
had influentially affected the current of my life.

I left Edinburgh, however, with not the least idea that
I had done a stroke of excellent business for myself,
and singly delighted to escape out of a somewhat dreary
house and plunge instead into the rainbow city of
Paris.  Every man has his own romance; mine clustered
exclusively about the practice of the arts, the life of
Latin Quarter students, and the world of Paris as
depicted by that grimy wizard, the author of the
COMEDIE HUMAINE.  I was not disappointed--I could not
have been; for I did not see the facts, I brought them
with me ready-made.  Z. Marcas lived next door to me in
my ungainly, ill-smelling hotel of the Rue Racine; I
dined at my villainous restaurant with Lousteau and
with Rastignac: if a curricle nearly ran me down at a
street-crossing, Maxime de Trailles would be the
driver.  I dined, I say, at a poor restaurant and lived
in a poor hotel; and this was not from need, but
sentiment.  My father gave me a profuse allowance, and
I might have lived (had I chosen) in the Quartier de
l'Etoile and driven to my studies daily.  Had I done
so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have
been but Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter
student, Murger's successor, living in flesh and blood
the life of one of those romances I had loved to read,
to re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of
Muskegon.

At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the
Latin Quarter.  The play of the VIE DE BOHEME (a
dreary, snivelling piece) had been produced at the
Odeon, had run an unconscionable time--for Paris--and
revived the freshness of the legend.  The same
business, you may say, or there and thereabout, was
being privately enacted in consequence in every garret
of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students
were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard,
to their own incommunicable satisfaction.  Some of us
went far, and some farther.  I always looked with awful
envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of my own
who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore
boots, and long hair in a net, and could be seen
tramping off, in this guise, to the worst eating-house
of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his
mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and
calling.  It takes some greatness of soul to carry even
folly to such heights as these; and for my own part, I
had to content myself by pretending very arduously to
be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and
by pursuing, through a series of misadventures, that
extinct mammal the grisette.  The most grievous part
was the eating and the drinking.  I was born with a
dainty tooth and a palate for wine; and only a genuine
devotion to romance could have supported me under the
cat-civets that I had to swallow, and the red ink of
Bercy I must wash them down withal.  Every now and
again, after a hard day at the studio, where I was
steadily and far from unsuccessfully industrious, a
wave of distaste would overbear me; I would slink away
from my haunts and companions, indemnify myself for
weeks of self-denial with fine wines and dainty dishes;
seated perhaps on a terrace, perhaps in an arbour in a
garden, with a volume of one of my favourite authors
propped open in front of me, and now consulted a while,
and now forgotten: so remain, relishing my situation,
till night fell and the lights of the city kindled; and
thence stroll homeward by the river-side, under the
moon or stars, in a heaven of poetry and digestion.

One such indulgence led me in the course of my second
year into an adventure which I must relate: indeed, it
is the very point I have been aiming for, since that
was what brought me in acquaintance with Jim Pinkerton.
I sat down alone to dinner one October day when the
rusty leaves were falling and scuttling on the
boulevard, and the minds of impressionable men inclined
in about an equal degree towards sadness and
conviviality.  The restaurant was no great place, but
boasted a considerable cellar and a long printed list
of vintages.  This I was perusing with the double zest
of a man who is fond of wine and a lover of beautiful
names, when my eye fell (near the end of the card) on
that not very famous or familiar brand, Roussillon.  I
remembered it was a wine I had never tasted, ordered a
bottle, found it excellent, and when I had discussed
the contents, called (according to my habit) for a
final pint.  It appears they did not keep Roussillon in
half-bottles.  "All right," said I, "another bottle."
The tables at this eating-house are close together; and
the next thing I can remember, I was in somewhat loud
conversation with my nearest neighbours.  From these I
must have gradually extended my attentions; for I have
a clear recollection of gazing about a room in which
every chair was half turned round and every face turned
smilingly to mine.  I can even remember what I was
saying at the moment; but after twenty years the embers
of shame are still alive, and I prefer to give your
imagination the cue by simply mentioning that my muse
was the patriotic.  It had been my design to adjourn
for coffee in the company of some of these new friends;
but I was no sooner on the sidewalk than I found myself
unaccountably alone.  The circumstance scarce surprised
me at the time, much less now; but I was somewhat
chagrined a little after to find I had walked into a
kiosque.  I began to wonder if I were any the worse for
my last bottle, and decided to steady myself with
coffee and brandy.  In the Cafe de la Source, where I
went for this restorative, the fountain was playing,
and (what greatly surprised me) the mill and the
various mechanical figures on the rockery appeared to
have been freshly repaired, and performed the most
enchanting antics.  The cafe was extraordinarily hot
and bright, with every detail of a conspicuous
clearness--from the faces of the guests, to the type of
the newspapers on the tables--and the whole apartment
swang to and fro like a hammock, with an exhilarating
motion.  For some while I was so extremely pleased with
these particulars that I thought I could never be weary
of beholding them: then dropped of a sudden into a
causeless sadness; and then, with the same swiftness
and spontaneity, arrived at the conclusion that I was
drunk and had better get to bed.

It was but a step or two to my hotel, where I got my
lighted candle from the porter, and mounted the four
flights to my own room.  Although I could not deny that
I was drunk, I was at the same time lucidly rational
and practical.  I had but one preoccupation--to be up
in time on the morrow for my work; and when I observed
the clock on my chimney-piece to have stopped, I
decided to go down-stairs again and give directions to
the porter.  Leaving the candle burning and my door
open, to be a guide to me on my return, I set forth
accordingly.  The house was quite dark; but as there
were only the three doors on each landing, it was
impossible to wander, and I had nothing to do but
descend the stairs until I saw the glimmer of the
porter's night-light.  I counted four flights: no
porter.  It was possible, of course, that I had
reckoned incorrectly; so I went down another and
another, and another, still counting as I went, until I
had reached the preposterous figure of nine flights.
It was now quite clear that I had somehow passed the
porter's lodge without remarking it; indeed, I was, at
the lowest figure, five pairs of stairs below the
street, and plunged in the very bowels of the earth.
That my hotel should thus be founded upon catacombs was
a discovery of considerable interest; and if I had not
been in a frame of mind entirely business-like, I might
have continued to explore all night this subterranean
empire.  But I was bound I must be up betimes on the
next morning, and for that end it was imperative that I
should find the porter.  I faced about accordingly, and
counting with painful care, remounted towards the level
of the street.  Five, six, and seven flights I climbed,
and still there was no porter.  I began to be weary of
the job, and reflecting that I was now close to my own
room, decided I should go to bed.  Eight, nine, ten,
eleven, twelve, thirteen flights I mounted; and my open
door seemed to be as wholly lost to me as the porter
and his floating dip.  I remembered that the house
stood but six stories at its highest point, from which
it appeared (on the most moderate computation) I was
now three stories higher than the roof.  My original
sense of amusement was succeeded by a not unnatural
irritation.  "My room has just GOT to be here,"
said I, and I stepped towards the door with outspread
arms.  There was no door and no wall; in place of
either there yawned before me a dark corridor, in which
I continued to advance for some time without
encountering the smallest opposition.  And this in a
house whose extreme area scantily contained three small
rooms, a narrow landing, and the stair! The thing was
manifestly nonsense; and you will scarcely be surprised
to learn that I now began to lose my temper.  At this
juncture I perceived a filtering of light along the
floor, stretched forth my hand, which encountered the
knob of a door-handle, and without further ceremony
entered a room.  A young lady was within: she was going
to bed, and her toilet was far advanced--or the other
way about, if you prefer.

"I hope you will pardon this intrusion," said I; "but
my room is No. 12, and something has gone wrong with
this blamed house."

She looked at me a moment; and then, "If you will step
outside for a moment, I will take you there," says she.

Thus, with perfect composure on both sides, the matter
was arranged.  I waited a while outside her door.
Presently she rejoined me, in a dressing-gown, took my
hand, led me up another flight, which made the fourth
above the level of the roof, and shut me into my own
room, where (being quite weary after these contra-
ordinary explorations) I turned in and slumbered like a
child.

I tell you the thing calmly, as it appeared to me to
pass; but the next day, when I awoke and put memory in
the witness-box, I could not conceal from myself that
the tale presented a good many improbable features.  I
had no mind for the studio, after all, and went instead
to the Luxembourg gardens, there, among the sparrows
and the statues and the falling leaves, to cool and
clear my head.  It is a garden I have always loved.
You sit there in a public place of history and fiction.
Barras and Fouche have looked from these windows.
Lousteau and De Banville (one as real as the other)
have rhymed upon these benches.  The city tramples by
without the railings to a lively measure; and within
and about you, trees rustle, children and sparrows
utter their small cries, and the statues look on for
ever.  Here, then, in a seat opposite the gallery
entrance, I set to work on the events of the last
night, to disengage (if it were possible) truth from
fiction.

The house, by daylight, had proved to be six stories
high, the same as ever.  I could find, with all my
architectural experience, no room in its altitude for
those interminable stairways, no width between its
walls for that long corridor, where I had tramped at
night.  And there was yet a greater difficulty.  I had
read somewhere an aphorism that everything may be false
to itself save human nature.  A house might elongate or
enlarge itself--or seem to do so to a gentleman who had
been dining.  The ocean might dry up, the rocks melt in
the sun, the stars fall from heaven like autumn apples;
and there was nothing in these incidents to boggle the
philosopher.  But the case of the young lady stood upon
a different foundation.  Girls were not good enough, or
not good that way, or else they were too good.  I was
ready to accept any of these views: all pointed to the
same conclusion, which I was thus already on the point
of reaching, when a fresh argument occurred, and
instantly confirmed it.  I could remember the exact
words we had each said; and I had spoken, and she had
replied, in English.  Plainly, then, the whole affair
was an illusion: catacombs, and stairs, and charitable
lady, all were equally the stuff of dreams.

I had just come to this determination, when there blew
a flaw of wind through the autumnal gardens; the dead
leaves showered down, and a flight of sparrows, thick
as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with sudden
pipings.  This agreeable bustle was the affair of a
moment, but it startled me from the abstraction into
which I had fallen like a summons.  I sat briskly up,
and as I did so my eyes rested on the figure of a lady
in a brown jacket and carrying a paint-box.  By her
side walked a fellow some years older than myself, with
an easel under his arm; and alike by their course and
cargo I might judge they were bound for the gallery,
where the lady was, doubtless, engaged upon some
copying.  You can imagine my surprise when I recognised
in her the heroine of my adventure.  To put the matter
beyond question our eyes met, and she, seeing herself
remembered, and recalling the trim in which I had last
beheld her, looked swiftly on the ground with just a
shadow of confusion.

I could not tell you to-day if she were plain or
pretty; but she had behaved with so much good sense,
and I had cut so poor a figure in her presence, that I
became instantly fired with the desire to display
myself in a more favourable light.  The young man,
besides, was possibly her brother; brothers are apt to
be hasty, theirs being a part in which it is possible,
at a comparatively early age, to assume the dignity of
manhood; and it occurred to me it might be wise to
forestall all possible complications by an apology.

On this reasoning I drew near to the gallery door, and
had hardly got in position before the young man came
out.  Thus it was that I came face to face with my
third destiny, for my career has been entirely shaped
by these three elements--my father, the capitol of
Muskegon, and my friend Jim Pinkerton.  As for the
young lady, with whom my mind was at the moment chiefly
occupied, I was never to hear more of her from that day
forward--an excellent example of the Blind Man's Buff
that we call life.

                      CHAPTER III
                           
                           
              TO INTRODUCE MR. PINKERTON

THE stranger, I have said, was some years older than
myself: a man of a good stature, a very lively face,
cordial, agitated manners, and a grey eye as active as
a fowl's.

"May I have a word with you?" said I.

"My dear sir," he replied, "I don't know what it can be
about, but you may have a hundred if you like."

"You have just left the side of a young lady," I
continued, "towards whom I was led (very
unintentionally) into the appearance of an offence.  To
speak to herself would be only to renew her
embarrassment, and I seize the occasion of making my
apology, and declaring my respect, to one of my own sex
who is her friend, and perhaps," I added, with a bow,
"her natural protector."

"You are a countryman of mine; I know it!" he cried: "I
am sure of it by your delicacy to a lady.  You do her
no more than justice.  I was introduced to her the
other night at tea, in the apartment of some people,
friends of mine; and meeting her again this morning, I
could not do less than carry her easel for her.  My
dear sir, what is your name?"

I was disappointed to find he had so little bond with
my young lady; and but that it was I who had sought the
acquaintance, might have been tempted to retreat.  At
the same time something in the stranger's eye engaged
me.

"My name," said I, "is Loudon Dodd; I am a student of
sculpture here from Muskegon."

"Of sculpture?" he cried, as though that would have
been his last conjecture.  "Mine is James Pinkerton; I
am delighted to have the pleasure of your
acquaintance."

"Pinkerton!" it was now my turn to exclaim.  "Are you
Broken-Stool Pinkerton?"

He admitted his identity with a laugh of boyish
delight; and indeed any young man in the quarter might
have been proud to own a sobriquet thus gallantly
acquired.

In order to explain the name, I must here digress into
a chapter of the history of manners in the nineteenth
century, very well worth commemoration for its own
sake.  In some of the studios at that date, the hazing
of new pupils was both barbarous and obscene.  Two
incidents, following one on the heels of the other,
tended to produce an advance in civilisation by the
means (as so commonly happens) of a passing appeal to
savage standards.  The first was the arrival of a
little gentleman from Armenia.  He had a fez upon his
head and (what nobody counted on) a dagger in his
pocket.  The hazing was set about in the customary
style, and, perhaps in virtue of the victim's head-
gear, even more boisterously than usual.  He bore it at
first with an inviting patience; but upon one of the
students proceeding to an unpardonable freedom, plucked
out his knife and suddenly plunged it in the belly of
the jester.  This gentleman, I am pleased to say,
passed months upon a bed of sickness before he was in a
position to resume his studies.  The second incident
was that which had earned Pinkerton his reputation.  In
a crowded studio, while some very filthy brutalities
were being practised on a trembling DEBUTANT, a
tall pale fellow sprang from his stool and (without the
smallest preface or explanation) sang out, "All English
and Americans to clear the shop!" Our race is brutal,
but not filthy; and the summons was nobly responded to.
Every Anglo-Saxon student seized his stool; in a moment
the studio was full of bloody coxcombs, the French
fleeing in disorder for the door, the victim liberated
and amazed.  In this feat of arms both English-speaking
nations covered themselves with glory; but I am proud
to claim the author of the whole for an American, and a
patriotic American at that, being the same gentleman
who had subsequently to be held down in the bottom of a
box during a performance of L'ONCLE SAM, sobbing at
intervals, "My country! O my country!" while yet
another (my new acquaintance Pinkerton) was supposed to
have made the most conspicuous figure in the actual
battle.  At one blow he had broken his own stool, and
sent the largest of his opponents back foremost through
what we used to call a "conscientious nude." It appears
that, in the continuation of his flight, this fallen
warrior issued on the boulevard still framed in the
burst canvas.

It will be understood how much talk the incident
aroused in the students' quarter, and that I was highly
gratified to make the acquaintance of my famous
countryman.  It chanced I was to see more of the
Quixotic side of his character before the morning was
done; for, as we continued to stroll together, I found
myself near the studio of a young Frenchman whose work
I had promised to examine, and in the fashion of the
quarter carried up Pinkerton along with me.  Some of my
comrades of this date were pretty obnoxious fellows.  I
could almost always admire and respect the grown-up
practitioners of art in Paris; but many of those who
were still in a state of pupilage were sorry specimens-
-so much so that I used often to wonder where the
painters came from, and where the brutes of students
went to.  A similar mystery hangs over the intermediate
stages of the medical profession, and must have
perplexed the least observant.  The ruffian, at least,
whom I now carried Pinkerton to visit, was one of the
most crapulous in the quarter.  He turned out for our
delectation a huge "crust" (as we used to call it) of
St. Stephen, wallowing in red upon his belly in an
exhausted receiver, and a crowd of Hebrews in blue,
green, and yellow, pelting him--apparently with buns;
and while we gazed upon this contrivance, regaled us
with a piece of his own recent biography, of which his
mind was still very full, and which, he seemed to
fancy, represented him in an heroic posture.  I was one
of those cosmopolitan Americans who accept the world
(whether at home or abroad) as they find it, and whose
favourite part is that of the spectator; yet even I was
listening with ill-suppressed disgust, when I was aware
of a violent plucking at my sleeve.

"Is he saying he kicked her down-stairs?" asked
Pinkerton, white as St. Stephen.

"Yes," said I: "his discarded mistress; and then he
pelted her with stones.  I suppose that's what gave him
the idea for his picture.  He has just been alleging
the pathetic excuse that she was old enough to be his
mother."

Something like a sob broke from Pinkerton.  "Tell him,"
he gasped--"I can't speak this language, though I
understand a little; I never had any proper education--
tell him I'm going to punch his head."

"For God's sake do nothing of the sort!" I cried, "they
don't understand that sort of thing here"; and I tried
to bundle him out.

"Tell him first what we think of him," he objected.
"Let me tell him what he looks in the eyes of a pure-
minded American"

"Leave that to me," said I, thrusting Pinkerton clear
through the door.

"QU'EST-CE QU'IL A?"[1] inquired the student.

[1] "What's the matter with him?"

"MONSIEUR SE SENT MAL AU COEUR D'AVOIR TROP REGARDE
VOTRE CROUTE,"[2] said I, and made my escape, scarce
with dignity, at Pinkerton's heels.

[2] "The gentleman is sick at his stomach from having
looked too long at your daub."

"What did you say to him?" he asked.

"The only thing that he could feel," was my reply.

After this scene, the freedom with which I had ejected
my new acquaintance, and the precipitation with which I
had followed him, the least I could do was to propose
luncheon.  I have forgot the name of the place to which
I led him, nothing loath; it was on the far side of the
Luxembourg at least, with a garden behind, where we
were speedily set face to face at table, and began to
dig into each other's history and character, like
terriers after rabbits, according to the approved
fashion of youth.

Pinkerton's parents were from the Old Country; there,
too, I incidentally gathered, he had himself been born,
though it was a circumstance he seemed prone to forget.
Whether he had run away, or his father had turned him
out, I never fathomed; but about the age of twelve he
was thrown upon his own resources.  A travelling tin-
type photographer picked him up, like a haw out of a
hedgerow, on a wayside in New Jersey; took a fancy to
the urchin; carried him on with him in his wandering
life; taught him all he knew himself--to take tin-types
(as well as I can make out) and doubt the Scriptures;
and died at last in Ohio at the corner of a road.  "He
was a grand specimen," cried Pinkerton; "I wish you
could have seen him, Mr. Dodd He had an appearance of
magnanimity that used to remind me of the patriarchs."
On the death of this random protector, the boy
inherited the plant and continued the business.  "It
was a life I could have chosen, Mr. Dodd!" he cried.
"I have been in all the finest scenes of that
magnificent continent that we were born to be the heirs
of I wish you could see my collection of tin-types; I
wish I had them here.  They were taken for my own
pleasure, and to be a memento: and they show Nature in
her grandest as well as her gentlest moments." As he
tramped the Western States and Territories, taking tin-
types, the boy was continually getting hold of books,
good, bad, and indifferent, popular and abstruse, from
the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's Elements, both
of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had
managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of
the people, the products, and the country, with an eye
unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive;
and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous
and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be
the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of
the born American.  To be pure-minded, to be patriotic,
to get culture and money with both hands and with the
same irrational fervour--these appeared to be the chief
articles of his creed.  In later days (not of course
upon this first occasion) I would sometimes ask him
why; and he had his answer pat.  "To build up the
type!" he would cry.

"We're all committed to that; we're all under bond to
fulfil the American Type! Loudon, the hope of the world
is there.  If we fail, like these old feudal
monarchies, what is left?"

The trade of a tin-typer proved too narrow for the
lad's ambition; it was insusceptible of expansion, he
explained; it was not truly modern; and by a sudden
conversion of front he became a railroad-scalper.  The
principles of this trade I never clearly understood;
but its essence appears to be to cheat the railroads
out of their due fare.  "I threw my whole soul into it;
I grudged myself food and sleep while I was at it; the
most practised hands admitted I had caught on to the
idea in a month and revolutionised the practice inside
of a year," he said.  "And there's interest in it, too.
It's amusing to pick out some one going by, make up
your mind about his character and tastes, dash out of
the office, and hit him flying with an offer of the
very place he wants to go to.  I don't think there was
a scalper on the continent made fewer blunders.  But I
took it only as a stage.  I was saving every dollar; I
was looking ahead.  I knew what I wanted--wealth,
education, a refined home, and a conscientious cultured
lady for a wife; for, Mr. Dodd"--this with a formidable
outcry--"every man is bound to marry above him: if the
woman's not the man's superior, I brand it as mere
sensuality.  There was my idea, at least.  That was
what I was saving for; and enough, too! But it isn't
every man, I know that--it's far from every man--could
do what I did: close up the livest agency in Saint Jo,
where he was coining dollars by the pot, set out alone,
without a friend, or a word of French, and settle down
here to spend his capital learning art."

"Was it an old taste?" I asked him, "or a sudden
fancy?"

"Neither, Mr. Dodd," he admitted.  "Of course I had
learned in my tin-typing excursions to glory and exult
in the works of God.  But it wasn't that.  I just said
to myself, "What is most wanted in my age and country?
More culture and more art," I said; and I chose the
best place, saved my money, and came here to get them."

The whole attitude of this young man warmed and shamed
me.  He had more fire in his little toe than I had in
my whole carcase; he was stuffed to bursting with the
manly virtues; thrift and courage glowed in him; and
even if his artistic vocation seemed (to one of my
exclusive tenets) not quite clear, who could predict
what might be accomplished by a creature so full-
blooded and so inspired with animal and intellectual
energy? So, when he proposed that I should come and see
his work (one of the regular stages of a Latin Quarter
friendship), I followed him with interest and hope.

He lodged parsimoniously at the top of a tall house
near the Observatory, in a bare room principally
furnished with his own trunks, and papered with his own
despicable studies.  No man has less taste for
disagreeable duties than myself; perhaps there is only
one subject on which I cannot flatter a man without a
blush; but upon that, upon all that touches art, my
sincerity is Roman.  Once and twice I made the circuit
of his walls in silence, spying in every corner for
some spark of merit; he meanwhile following close at my
heels, reading the verdict in my face with furtive
glances, presenting some fresh study for my inspection
with undisguised anxiety, and (after it had been
silently weighed in the balances and found wanting)
whisking it away with an open gesture of despair.  By
the time the second round was completed, we were both
extremely depressed.

"Oh!" he groaned, breaking the long silence, "it's
quite unnecessary you should speak!"

"Do you want me to be frank with you? I think you are
wasting time," said I.

"You don't see any promise?" he inquired, beguiled by
some return of hope, and turning upon me the
embarrassing brightness of his eye.  "Not in this
still-life here of the melon? One fellow thought it
good."

It was the least I could do to give the melon a more
particular examination; which, when I had done, I could
but shake my head.  "I am truly sorry, Pinkerton," said
I, "but I can't advise you to persevere."

He seemed to recover his fortitude at the moment,
rebounding from disappointment like a man of india-
rubber.  "Well," said he stoutly, "I don't know that
I'm surprised.  But I'll go on with the course; and
throw my whole soul into it too.  You mustn't think the
time is lost.  It's all culture; it will help me to
extend my relations when I get back home; it may fit me
for a position on one of the illustrateds; and then I
can always turn dealer," he said, uttering the
monstrous proposition, which was enough to shake the
Latin Quarter to the dust, with entire simplicity.
"It's all experience, besides," he continued; "and it
seems to me there's a tendency to underrate experience,
both as net profit and investment.  Never mind.  That's
done with.  But it took courage for you to say what you
did, and I'll never forget it.  Here's my hand, Mr.
Dodd.  I'm not your equal in culture or talent."

"You know nothing about that," I interrupted.  "I have
seen your work, but you haven't seen mine.

"No more I have," he cried; "and let's go see it at
once! But I know you are away up; I can feel it here."

To say truth, I was almost ashamed to introduce him to
my studio--my work, whether absolutely good or bad,
being so vastly superior to his.  But his spirits were
now quite restored; and he amazed me, on the way, with
his light-hearted talk and new projects.  So that I
began at last to understand how matters lay: that this
was not an artist who had been deprived of the practice
of his single art; but only a business man of very
extended interests, informed (perhaps something of the
most suddenly) that one investment out of twenty had
gone wrong.

As a matter of fact, besides (although I never
suspected it), he was already seeking consolation with
another of the muses, and pleasing himself with the
notion that he would repay me for my sincerity, cement
our friendship, and (at one and the same blow) restore
my estimation of his talents.  Several times already,
when I had been speaking of myself, he had pulled out a
writing-pad and scribbled a brief note; and now, when
we entered the studio, I saw it in his hand again, and
the pencil go to his mouth, as he cast a comprehensive
glance round the uncomfortable building.

"Are you going to make a sketch of it?" I could not
help asking, as I unveiled the Genius of Muskegon.

"Ah, that's my secret," said he.  "Never you mind.  A
mouse can help a lion."

He walked round my statue, and had the design explained
to him.  I had represented Muskegon as a young, almost
a stripling mother, with something of an Indian type;
the babe upon her knees was winged, to indicate our
soaring future; and her seat was a medley of sculptured
fragments, Greek, Roman, and Gothic, to remind us of
the older worlds from which we trace our generation.

"Now, does this satisfy you, Mr. Dodd?" he inquired, as
soon as I had explained to him the main features of the
design.

"Well," I said, "the fellows seem to think it's not a
bad BONNE FEMME for a beginner.  I don't think it's
entirely bad myself Here is the best point; it builds
up best from here.  No, it seems to me it has a kind of
merit," I admitted; "but I mean to do better."

"Ah, that's the word!" cried Pinkerton.  "There's the
word I love!" and he scribbled in his pad.

"What in creation ails you?" I inquired.  "It's the
most commonplace expression in the English language."

"Better and better!" chuckled Pinkerton.  "The
unconsciousness of genius.  Lord, but this is coming in
beautiful!" and he scribbled again.

"If you're going to be fulsome," said I, "I'll close
the place of entertainment"; and I threatened to
replace the veil upon the Genius.

"No, no," said he; "don't be in a hurry.  Give me a
point or two.  Show me what's particularly good."

"I would rather you found that out for yourself," said
I.

"The trouble is," said he, "that I've never turned my
attention to sculpture--beyond, of course, admiring it,
as everybody must who has a soul.  So do just be a good
fellow, and explain to me what you like in it, and what
you tried for, and where the merit comes in.  It'll be
all education for me."

"Well, in sculpture, you see, the first thing you have
to consider is the masses.  It's, after all, a kind of
architecture," I began, and delivered a lecture on that
branch of art, with illustrations from my own
masterpiece there present--all of which, if you don't
mind, or whether you mind or not, I mean to
conscientiously omit.  Pinkerton listened with a fiery
interest, questioned me with a certain uncultivated
shrewdness, and continued to scratch down notes, and
tear fresh sheets from his pad.  I found it inspiring
to have my words thus taken down like a professor's
lecture; and having had no previous experience of the
press, I was unaware that they were all being taken
down wrong.  For the same reason (incredible as it must
appear in an American) I never entertained the least
suspicion that they were destined to be dished up with
a sauce of penny-a-lining gossip; and myself, my
person, and my works of art, butchered to make a
holiday for the readers of a Sunday paper.  Night had
fallen over the Genius of Muskegon before the issue of
my theoretic eloquence was stayed, nor did I separate
from my new friend without an appointment for the
morrow.

I was, indeed, greatly taken with this first view of my
countryman, and continued, on further acquaintance, to
be interested, amused, and attracted by him in about
equal proportions.  I must not say he had a fault, not
only because my mouth is sealed by gratitude, but
because those he had sprang merely from his education,
and you could see he had cultivated and improved them
like virtues.  For all that, I can never deny he was a
troublous friend to me, and the trouble began early.

It may have been a fortnight later that I divined the
secret of the writing-pad.  My wretch (it leaked out)
wrote letters for a paper in the West, and had filled a
part of one of them with descriptions of myself I
pointed out to him that he had no right to do so
without asking my permission.

"Why, this is just what I hoped!" he exclaimed.  "I
thought you didn't seem to catch on; only it seemed too
good to be true."

"But, my good fellow, you were bound to warn me," I
objected.

"I know it's generally considered etiquette," he
admitted; "but between friends, and when it was only
with a view of serving you, I thought it wouldn't
matter.  I wanted it (if possible) to come on you as a
surprise; I wanted you just to waken, like Lord Byron,
and find the papers full of you.  You must admit it was
a natural thought.  And no man likes to boast of a
favour beforehand."

"But, heavens and earth! how do you know I think it a
favour?" I cried.

He became immediately plunged in despair.  "You think
it a liberty," said he; "I see that.  I would rather
have cut off my hand.  I would stop it now, only it's
too late; it's published by now.  And I wrote it with
so much pride and pleasure!"

I could think of nothing but how to console him.  "O, I
daresay it's all right," said I.  "I know you meant it
kindly, and you would be sure to do it in good taste."

"That you may swear to," he cried.  "It's a pure,
bright, A number 1 paper; the St.  Jo SUNDAY
HERALD. The idea of the series was quite my own; I
interviewed the editor, put it to him straight; the
freshness of the idea took him, and I walked out of
that office with the contract in my pocket, and did my
first Paris letter that evening in Saint Jo.  The
editor did no more than glance his eye down the
headlines.  'You're the man for us,' said he."

I was certainly far from reassured by this sketch of
the class of literature in which I was to make my first
appearance; but I said no more, and possessed my soul
in patience, until the day came when I received a copy
of a newspaper marked in the corner, "Compliments of J.
P." I opened it with sensible shrinkings; and there,
wedged between an account of a prize-fight and a
skittish article upon chiropody--think of chiropody
treated with a leer!--I came upon a column and a half
in which myself and my poor statue were embalmed.  Like
the editor with the first of the series, I did but
glance my eye down the head-lines, and was more than
satisfied.

          ANOTHER OF PINKERTON'S SPICY CHATS.
                           
              ART PRACTITIONERS IN PARIS.
                           
             MUSKEGON'S COLUMNED CAPITOL.
                           
               SON OF MILLIONAIRE DODD,
                           
                  PATRIOT AND ARTIST.
                           
               "HE MEANS TO DO BETTER."

In the body of the text, besides, my eye caught, as it
passed, some deadly expressions: "Figure somewhat
fleshy," "bright, intellectual smile," "the
unconsciousness of genius," "'Now, Mr. Dodd,' resumed
the reporter, 'what would be your idea of a
distinctively American quality in sculpture?'" It was
true the question had been asked; it was true, alas!
that I had answered: and now here was my reply, or some
strange hash of it, gibbeted in the cold publicity of
type.  I thanked God that my French fellow-students
were ignorant of English; but when I thought of the
British--of Myner (for instance) or the Stennises--I
think I could have fallen on Pinkerton and beat him.

To divert my thoughts (if it were possible) from this
calamity, I turned to a letter from my father which had
arrived by the same post.  The envelope contained a
strip of newspaper cutting; and my eye caught again,
"Son of Millionaire Dodd--Figure somewhat fleshy," and
the rest of the degrading nonsense.  What would my
father think of it? I wondered, and opened his
manuscript.  "My dearest boy," it began, "I send you a
cutting which has pleased me very much, from a St.
Joseph paper of high standing.  At last you seem to be
coming fairly to the front, and I cannot but reflect
with delight and gratitude how very few youths of your
age occupy nearly two columns of press-matter all to
themselves.  I only wish your dear mother had been here
to read it over my shoulder; but we will hope she
shares my grateful emotion in a better place.  Of
course I have sent a copy to your grandfather and uncle
in Edinburgh; so you can keep the one I enclose.  This
Jim Pinkerton seems a valuable acquaintance; he has
certainly great talent; and it is a good general rule
to keep in with pressmen."

I hope it will be set down to the right side of my
account, but I had no sooner read these words, so
touchingly silly, than my anger against Pinkerton was
swallowed up in gratitude.  Of all the circumstances of
my career--my birth, perhaps, excepted--not one had
given my poor father so profound a pleasure as this
article in the SUNDAY HERALD.  What a fool, then,
was I to be lamenting! when I had at last, and for
once, and at the cost of only a few blushes, paid back
a fraction of my debt of gratitude.  So that, when I
next met Pinkerton, I took things very lightly; my
father was pleased, and thought the letter very clever,
I told him; for my own part, I had no taste for
publicity; thought the public had no concern with the
artist, only with his art; and though I owned he had
handled it with great consideration, I should take it
as a favour if he never did it again.

"There it is," he said despondingly.  "I've hurt you.
You can't deceive me, Loudon.  It's the want of tact,
and it's incurable." He sat down, and leaned his head
upon his hand.  "I had no advantages when I was young,
you see," he added.

"Not in the least, my dear fellow," said I.  "Only the
next time you wish to do me a service, just speak about
my work; leave my wretched person out, and my still
more wretched conversation; and above all," I added,
with an irrepressible shudder, "don't tell them how I
said it! There's that phrase, now: "With a proud, glad
smile." Who cares whether I smiled or not?"

"Oh, there now, Loudon, you're entirely wrong," he
broke in.  "That's what the public likes; that's the
merit of the thing, the literary value.  It's to call
up the scene before them; it's to enable the humblest
citizen to enjoy that afternoon the same as I did.
Think what it would have been to me when I was tramping
around with my tin-types to find a column and a half of
real, cultured conversation--an artist, in his studio
abroad, talking of his art,--and to know how he looked
as he did it, and what the room was like, and what he
had for breakfast; and to tell myself, eating tinned
beans beside a creek, that if all went well, the same
sort of thing would, sooner or later, happen to myself;
why, Loudon, it would have been like a peep-hole into
heaven!"

"Well, if it gives so much pleasure," I admitted, "the
sufferers shouldn't complain.  Only give the other
fellows a turn."

The end of the matter was to bring myself and the
journalist in a more close relation.  If I know
anything at all of human nature--and the IF is no
mere figure of speech, but stands for honest doubt--no
series of benefits conferred, or even dangers shared,
would have so rapidly confirmed our friendship as this
quarrel avoided, this fundamental difference of taste
and training accepted and condoned.

                      CHAPTER IV
                           
                           
       IN WHICH I EXPERIENCE EXTREMES OF FORTUNE

WHETHER it came from my training and repeated
bankruptcy at the Commercial College, or by direct
inheritance from old Loudon, the Edinburgh mason, there
can be no doubt about the fact that I was thrifty.
Looking myself impartially over, I believe that is my
only manly virtue.  During my first two years in Paris
I not only made it a point to keep well inside of my
allowance, but accumulated considerable savings in the
bank.  You will say, with my masquerade of living as a
penniless student, it must have been easy to do so: I
should have had no difficulty, however, in doing the
reverse.  Indeed, it is wonderful I did not; and early
in the third year, or soon after I had known Pinkerton,
a singular incident proved it to have been equally
wise.  Quarter-day came, and brought no allowance.  A
letter of remonstrance was despatched, and, for the
first time in my experience, remained unanswered.  A
cablegram was more effectual; for it brought me at
least a promise of attention.  "Will write at once," my
father telegraphed, but I waited long for his letter.
I was puzzled, angry, and alarmed; but, thanks to my
previous thrift, I cannot say that I was ever
practically embarrassed.  The embarrassment, the
distress, the agony, were all for my unhappy father at
home in Muskegon, struggling for life and fortune
against untoward chances, returning at night, from a
day of ill-starred shifts and ventures, to read and
perhaps to weep over that last harsh letter from his
only child, to which he lacked the courage to reply.

Nearly three months after time, and when my economies
were beginning to run low, I received at last a letter
with the customary bills of exchange.

"My dearest boy," it ran, "I believe, in the press of
anxious business, your letters, and even your
allowance, have been somewhile neglected.  You must try
to forgive your poor old dad, for he has had a trying
time; and now when it is over, the doctor wants me to
take my shot-gun and go to the Adirondacks for a
change.  You must not fancy I am sick, only over-driven
and under the weather.  Many of our foremost operators
have gone down: John T. M'Brady skipped to Canada with
a trunkful of boodle; Billy Sandwith, Charlie Downs,
Joe Kaiser, and many others of our leading men in this
city bit the dust.  But Big Head Dodd has again
weathered the blizzard, and I think I have fixed things
so that we may be richer than ever before autumn.

"Now I will tell you, my dear, what I propose.  You say
you are well advanced with your first statue; start in
manfully and finish it, and if your teacher--I can
never remember how to spell his name--will send me a
certificate that it is up to market standard, you shall
have ten thousand dollars to do what you like with,
either at home or in Paris.  I suggest, since you say
the facilities for work are so much greater in that
city, you would do well to buy or build a little home;
and the first thing you know, your dad will be dropping
in for a luncheon.  Indeed, I would come now--for I am
beginning to grow old, and I long to see my dear boy,--
but there are still some operations that want watching
and nursing.  Tell your friend Mr. Pinkerton that I
read his letters every week; and though I have looked
in vain lately for my Loudon's name, still I learn
something of the life he is leading in that strange Old
World depicted by an able pen."

Here was a letter that no young man could possibly
digest in solitude.  It marked one of those junctures
when the confidant is necessary; and the confidant
selected was none other than Jim Pinkerton.  My
father's message may have had an influence in this
decision; but I scarce suppose so, for the intimacy was
already far advanced.  I had a genuine and lively taste
for my compatriot; I laughed at, I scolded, and I loved
him.  He, upon his side, paid me a kind of dog-like
service of admiration, gazing at me from afar off, as
at one who had liberally enjoyed those "advantages"
which he envied for himself.  He followed at heel; his
laugh was ready chorus; our friends gave him the
nickname of "The Henchman." It was in this insidious
form that servitude approached me.

Pinkerton and I read and re-read the famous news: he, I
can swear, with an enjoyment as unalloyed and far more
vocal than my own.  The statue was nearly done: a few
days' work sufficed to prepare it for exhibition; the
master was approached; he gave his consent; and one
cloudless morning of May beheld us gathered in my
studio for the hour of trial.  The master wore his
many-hued rosette; he came attended by two of my French
fellow-pupils--friends of mine, and both considerable
sculptors in Paris at this hour.  "Corporal John" (as
we used to call him), breaking for once those habits of
study and reserve which have since carried him so high
in the opinion of the world, had left his easel of a
morning to countenance a fellow-countryman in some
suspense.  My dear old Romney was there by particular
request; for who that knew him would think a pleasure
quite complete unless he shared it, or not support a
mortification more easily if he were present to
console? The party was completed by John Myner, the
Englishman; by the brothers Stennis--Stennis-AINE
and Stennis-FRERE, as they used to figure on their
accounts at Barbizon--a pair of hare-brained Scots; and
by the inevitable Jim, as white as a sheet and bedewed
with the sweat of anxiety.

I suppose I was little better myself when I unveiled
the Genius of Muskegon.  The master walked about it
seriously; then he smiled.

"It is already not so bad," said he, in that funny
English of which he was so proud; "no, already not so
bad."

We all drew a deep breath of relief; and Corporal John
(as the most considerable junior present) explained to
him it was intended for a public building, a kind of
prefecture.

"HE! QUOI?" cried he, relapsing into French.
"QU'EST-CE QUE VOUS ME CHANTEZ LA?  O, in America," he
added, on further information being hastily furnished.
"That is anozer sing.  O, very good--very good."

The idea of the required certificate had to be
introduced to his mind in the light of a pleasantry--
the fancy of a nabob little more advanced than the Red
Indians of "Fennimore Cooperr"; and it took all our
talents combined to conceive a form of words that would
be acceptable on both sides.  One was found, however:
Corporal John engrossed it in his undecipherable hand,
the master lent it the sanction of his name and
flourish, I slipped it into an envelope along with one
of the two letters I had ready prepared in my pocket,
and as the rest of us moved off along the boulevard to
breakfast, Pinkerton was detached in a cab and duly
committed it to the post.

The breakfast was ordered at Lavenue's, where no one
need be ashamed to entertain even the master; the table
was laid in the garden; I had chosen the bill of fare
myself; on the wine question we held a council of war,
with the most fortunate results; and the talk, as soon
as the master laid aside his painful English, became
fast and furious.  There were a few interruptions,
indeed, in the way of toasts.  The master's health had
to be drunk, and he responded in a little well-turned
speech, full of neat allusions to my future and to the
United States; my health followed; and then my father's
must not only be proposed and drunk, but a full report
must be despatched to him at once by cablegram--an
extravagance which was almost the means of the master's
dissolution.  Choosing Corporal John to be his
confidant (on the ground, I presume, that he was
already too good an artist to be any longer an American
except in name) he summed up his amazement in one oft-
repeated formula--"C'EST BARBARE!" Apart from these
genial formalities, we talked, talked of art, and
talked of it as only artists can.  Here in the South
Seas we talk schooners most of the time; in the Quarter
we talked art with the like unflagging interest, and
perhaps as much result.

Before very long the master went away; Corporal John
(who was already a sort of young master) followed on
his heels; and the rank and file were naturally
relieved by their departure.  We were now among equals;
the bottle passed, the conversation sped.  I think I
can still hear the Stennis brothers pour forth their
copious tirades; Dijon, my portly French fellow-
student, drop witticisms, well-conditioned like
himself; and another (who was weak in foreign
languages) dash hotly into the current of talk with
some "JE TROVE QUE PORE OON SONTIMONG DE DELICACY,
COROT ...," or some "POUR MOI COROT EST LE PLOU
...," and then, his little raft of French foundering
at once, scramble silently to shore again.  He at least
could understand; but to Pinkerton, I think the noise,
the wine, the sun, the shadows of the leaves, and the
esoteric glory of being seated at a foreign festival,
made up the whole available means of entertainment.

We sat down about half-past eleven; I suppose it was
two when, some point arising and some particular
picture being instanced, an adjournment to the Louvre
was proposed.  I paid the score, and in a moment we
were trooping down the Rue de Renne.  It was smoking
hot; Paris glittered with that superficial brilliancy
which is so agreeable to the man in high spirits, and
in moods of dejection so depressing; the wine sang in
my ears, it danced and brightened in my eyes.  The
pictures that we saw that afternoon, as we sped briskly
and loquaciously through the immortal galleries, appear
to me, upon a retrospect, the loveliest of all; the
comments we exchanged to have touched the highest mark
of criticism, grave or gay.

It was only when we issued again from the museum that a
difference of race broke up the party.  Dijon proposed
an adjournment to a cafe, there to finish the afternoon
on beer; the elder Stennis revolted at the thought,
moved for the country--a forest, if possible--and a
long walk.  At once the English speakers rallied to the
name of any exercise; even to me, who have been often
twitted with my sedentary habits, the thought of
country air and stillness proved invincibly attractive.
It appeared, upon investigation, we had just time to
hail a cab and catch one of the fast trains for
Fontainebleau.  Beyond the clothes we stood in all were
destitute of what is called, with dainty vagueness,
personal effects; and it was earnestly mooted, on the
other side, whether we had not time to call upon the
way and pack a satchel? But the Stennis boys exclaimed
upon our effeminacy.  They had come from London, it
appeared, a week before with nothing but great-coats
and tooth-brushes.  No baggage--there was the secret of
existence.  It was expensive, to be sure, for every
time you had to comb your hair a barber must be paid,
and every time you changed your linen one shirt must be
bought and another thrown away; but anything was
better, argued these young gentlemen, than to be the
slaves of haversacks.  "A fellow has to get rid
gradually of all material attachments: that was
manhood," said they; "and as long as you were bound
down to anything--house, umbrella, or portmanteau--you
were still tethered by the umbilical cord." Something
engaging in this theory carried the most of us away.
The two Frenchmen, indeed, retired scoffing to their
bock, and Romney, being too poor to join the excursion
on his own resources, and too proud to borrow, melted
unobtrusively away.  Meanwhile the remainder of the
company crowded the benches of a cab; the horse was
urged, as horses have to be, by an appeal to the pocket
of the driver; the train caught by the inside of a
minute; and in less than an hour and a half we were
breathing deep of the sweet air of the forest, and
stretching our legs up the hill from Fontainebleau
octroi, bound for Barbizon.  That the leading members
of our party covered the distance in fifty-one minutes
and a half is, I believe, one of the historic landmarks
of the colony; but you will scarce be surprised to
learn that I was somewhat in the rear.  Myner, a
comparatively philosophic Briton, kept me company in my
deliberate advance; the glory of the sun's going down,
the fall of the long shadows, the inimitable scent, and
the inspiration of the woods, attuned me more and more
to walk in a silence which progressively infected my
companion; and I remember that, when at last he spoke,
I was startled from a deep abstraction.

"Your father seems to be a pretty good kind of a
father," said he.  "Why don't he come to see you?" I
was ready with some dozen of reasons, and had more in
stock; but Myner, with that shrewdness which made him
feared and admired, suddenly fixed me with his eye-
glass and asked, "Ever press him?"

The blood came in my face.  No, I had never pressed
him; I had never even encouraged him to come.  I was
proud of him, proud of his handsome looks, of his kind,
gentle ways, of that bright face he could show when
others were happy; proud, too--meanly proud, if you
like--of his great wealth and startling liberalities.
And yet he would have been in the way of my Paris life,
of much of which he would have disapproved.  I had
feared to expose to criticism his innocent remarks on
art; I had told myself, I had even partly believed, he
did not want to come; I had been, and still am,
convinced that he was sure to be unhappy out of
Muskegon; in short, I had a thousand reasons, good and
bad, not all of which could alter one iota of the fact
that I knew he only waited for my invitation.

"Thank you, Myner," said I; "you're a much better
fellow than ever I supposed.  I'll write to-night."

"O, you're a pretty decent sort yourself," returned
Myner, with more than his usual flippancy of manner,
but, as I was gratefully aware, not a trace of his
occasional irony of meaning.

Well, these were brave days, on which I could dwell for
ever.  Brave, too, were those that followed, when
Pinkerton and I walked Paris and the suburbs, viewing
and pricing houses for my new establishment, or covered
ourselves with dust and returned laden with Chinese
gods and brass warming-pans from the dealers in
antiquities.  I found Pinkerton well up in the
situation of these establishments as well as in the
current prices, and with quite a smattering of critical
judgment.  It turned out he was investing capital in
pictures and curiosities for the States, and the
superficial thoroughness of the creature appeared in
the fact that although he would never be a connoisseur,
he was already something of an expert.  The things
themselves left him as near as may be cold, but he had
a joy of his own in understanding how to buy and sell
them.

In such engagements the time passed until I might very
well expect an answer from my father.  Two mails
followed each other, and brought nothing.  By the third
I received a long and almost incoherent letter of
remorse, encouragement, consolation, and despair.  From
this pitiful document, which (with a movement of piety)
I burned as soon as I had read it, I gathered that the
bubble of my father's wealth was burst, that he was now
both penniless and sick; and that I, so far from
expecting ten thousand dollars to throw away in
juvenile extravagance, must look no longer for the
quarterly remittances on which I lived.  My case was
hard enough; but I had sense enough to perceive, and
decency enough to do, my duty.  I sold my curiosities--
or, rather, I sent Pinkerton to sell them; and he had
previously bought, and now disposed of them, so wisely
that the loss was trifling.  This, with what remained
of my last allowance, left me at the head of no less
than five thousand francs.  Five hundred I reserved for
my own immediate necessities: the rest I mailed inside
of the week to my father at Muskegon, where they came
in time to pay his funeral expenses.

The news of his death was scarcely a surprise and
scarce a grief to me.  I could not conceive my father a
poor man.  He had led too long a life of thoughtless
and generous profusion to endure the change; and though
I grieved for myself, I was able to rejoice that my
father had been taken from the battle.  I grieved, I
say, for myself; and it is probable there were at the
same date many thousands of persons grieving with less
cause.  I had lost my father; I had lost the allowance;
my whole fortune (including what had been returned from
Muskegon) scarce amounted to a thousand francs; and, to
crown my sorrows, the statuary contract had changed
hands.  The new contractor had a son of his own, or
else a nephew; and it was signified to me, with
business-like plainness, that I must find another
market for my pigs.  In the meanwhile I had given up my
room, and slept on a truckle-bed in the corner of the
studio, where, as I read myself to sleep at night, and
when I awoke in the morning, that now useless bulk, the
Genius of Muskegon, was ever present to my eyes.  Poor
stone lady! born to be enthroned under the gilded,
echoing dome of the new capitol, whither was she now to
drift? for what base purposes be ultimately broken up,
like an unseaworthy ship? and what should befall her
ill-starred artificer, standing with his thousand
francs on the threshold of a life so hard as that of
the unbefriended sculptor?

It was a subject often and earnestly debated by myself
and Pinkerton.  In his opinion I should instantly
discard my profession.  "Just drop it, here and now,"
he would say.  "Come back home with me, and let's throw
our whole soul into business.  I have the capital; you
bring the culture.  DODD AND PINKERTON--I never saw
a better name for an advertisement; and you can't
think, Loudon, how much depends upon a name." On my
side I would admit that a sculptor should possess one
of three things--capital, influence, or an energy only
to be qualified as hellish.  The first two I had now
lost; to the third I never had the smallest claim; and
yet I wanted the cowardice (or, perhaps it was the
courage) to turn my back on my career without a fight.
I told him, besides, that however poor my chances were
in sculpture, I was convinced they were yet worse in
business, for which I equally lacked taste and
aptitude.  But upon this head he was my father over
again; assured me that I spoke in ignorance; that any
intelligent and cultured person was bound to succeed;
that I must, besides, have inherited some of my
father's fitness; and, at any rate, that I had been
regularly trained for that career in the commercial
college.

"Pinkerton," I said, "can't you understand that, as
long as I was there, I never took the smallest interest
in any stricken thing? The whole affair was poison to
me."

"It's not possible," he would cry; "it can't be; you
couldn't live in the midst of it and not feel the
charm; with all your poetry of soul you couldn't help!
Loudon," he would go on, "you drive me crazy.  You
expect a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and
not to care a dime for a place where fortunes are
fought for and made and lost all day; or for a career
that consists in studying up life till you have it at
your finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can
get your hand in and a dollar out, and standing there
in the midst--one foot on bankruptcy, the other on a
borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning round you
like a mill--raking in the stamps, in spite of fate and
fortune."

To this romance of dickering I would reply with the
romance (which is also the virtue) of art: reminding
him of those examples of constancy through many
tribulations, with which the ROLE of Apollo is
illustrated--from the case of Millet, to those of many
of our friends and comrades, who had chosen this
agreeable mountain path through life, and were now
bravely clambering among rocks and brambles, penniless
and hopeful.

"You will never understand it, Pinkerton," I would say.
"You look to the result, you want to see some profit of
your endeavours: that is why you could never learn to
paint, if you lived to be Methusalem.  The result is
always a fizzle: the eyes of the artist are turned in;
he lives for a frame of mind.  Look at Romney now.
There is the nature of the artist.  He hasn't a cent;
and if you offered him to-morrow the command of an
army, or the presidentship of the United States, he
wouldn't take it, and you know he wouldn't."

"I suppose not," Pinkerton would cry, scouring his hair
with both his hands; "and I can't see why; I can't see
what in fits he would be after, not to; I don't seem to
rise to these views.  Of course it's the fault of not
having had advantages in early life; but, Loudon, I'm
so miserably low that it seems to me silly.  The fact
is," he might add, with a smile, "I don't seem to have
the least use for a frame of mind without square meals;
and you can't get it out of my head that it's a man's
duty to die rich, if he can."

"What for?" I asked him once.

"O, I don't know," he replied.  "Why in snakes should
anybody want to be a sculptor, if you come to that? I
would love to sculp myself.  But what I can't see is
why you should want to do nothing else.  It seems to
argue a poverty of nature."

Whether or not he ever came to understand me--and I
have been so tossed about since then that I am not very
sure I understand myself--he soon perceived that I was
perfectly in earnest; and after about ten days of
argument, suddenly dropped the subject, and announced
that he was wasting capital, and must go home at once.
No doubt he should have gone long before, and had
already lingered over his intended time for the sake of
our companionship and my misfortune; but man is so
unjustly minded that the very fact, which ought to have
disarmed, only embittered my vexation.  I resented his
departure in the light of a desertion; I would not say,
but doubtless I betrayed it; and something hang-dog in
the man's face and bearing led me to believe he was
himself remorseful.  It is certain at least that,
during the time of his preparations, we drew sensibly
apart--a circumstance that I recall with shame.  On the
last day he had me to dinner at a restaurant which he
knew I had formerly frequented, and had only forsworn
of late from considerations of economy.  He seemed ill
at ease; I was myself both sorry and sulky; and the
meal passed with little conversation.

"Now, Loudon," said he, with a visible effort, after
the coffee was come and our pipes lighted, "you can
never understand the gratitude and loyalty I bear you.
You don't know what a boon it is to be taken up by a
man that stands on the pinnacle of civilisation; you
can't think how it's refined and purified me, how it's
appealed to my spiritual nature; and I want to tell you
that I would die at your door like a dog.

I don't know what answer I tried to make, but he cut me
short.

"Let me say it out!" he cried.  "I revere you for your
whole-souled devotion to art; I can't rise to it, but
there's a strain of poetry in my nature, Loudon, that
responds to it.  I want you to carry it out, and I mean
to help you."

"Pinkerton, what nonsense is this?" I interrupted.

"Now don't get mad, Loudon; this is a plain piece of
business," said he; "it's done every day; it's even
typical.  How are all those fellows over here in Paris,
Henderson, Sumner, Long?--it's all the same story: a
young man just plum full of artistic genius on the one
side, a man of business on the other who doesn't know
what to do with his dollars

"But, you fool, you're as poor as a rat," I cried.

"You wait till I get my irons in the fire!" returned
Pinkerton.  "I'm bound to be rich; and I tell you I
mean to have some of the fun as I go along.  Here's
your first allowance; take it at the hand of a friend;
I'm one that holds friendship sacred, as you do
yourself It's only a hundred francs; you'll get the
same every month, and as soon as my business begins to
expand we'll increase it to something fitting.  And so
far from its being a favour, just let me handle your
statuary for the American market, and I'll call it one
of the smartest strokes of business in my life."

It took me a long time, and it had cost us both much
grateful and painful emotion, before I had finally
managed to refuse his offer and compounded for a bottle
of particular wine.  He dropped the subject at last
suddenly with a "Never mind; that's all done with"; nor
did he again refer to the subject, though we passed
together the rest of the afternoon, and I accompanied
him, on his departure; to the doors of the waiting-room
at St. Lazare.  I felt myself strangely alone; a voice
told me that I had rejected both the counsels of wisdom
and the helping hand of friendship; and as I passed
through the great bright city on my homeward way, I
measured it for the first time with the eye of an
adversary.

                       CHAPTER V
                           
                           
        IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS

IN no part of the world is starvation an agreeable
business; but I believe it is admitted there is no
worse place to starve in than this city of Paris.  The
appearances of life are there so especially gay, it is
so much a magnified beer-garden, the houses are so
ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of the
vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of
mind or pain of body is constantly driven in upon
himself.  In his own eyes, he seems the one serious
creature moving in a world of horrible unreality;
voluble people issuing from a cafe, the QUEUE at
theatre-doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-
seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show
in the jewellers' windows--all the familiar sights
contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and
isolation.  At the same time, if he be at all after my
pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish
satisfaction.  "This is life at last," he may tell
himself; "this is the real thing.  The bladders on
which I was set swimming are now empty; my own weight
depends upon the ocean: by my own exertions I must
perish or succeed; and I am now enduring, in the vivid
fact, what I so much delighted to read of in the case
of Lousteau or Lucien, Rodolphe or Schaunard."

Of the steps of my misery I cannot tell at length.  In
ordinary times what were politically called "loans"
(although they were never meant to be repaid) were
matters of constant course among the students, and many
a man has partly lived on them for years.  But my
misfortune befell me at an awkward juncture.  Many of
my friends were gone; others were themselves in a
precarious situation.  Romney (for instance) was
reduced to tramping Paris in a pair of country sabots,
his only suit of clothes so imperfect (in spite of
cunningly-adjusted pins) that the authorities at the
Luxembourg suggested his withdrawal from the gallery.
Dijon, too, was on a lee-shore, designing clocks and
gas-brackets for a dealer: and the most he could do was
to offer me a corner of his studio where I might work.
My own studio (it will be gathered) I had by that time
lost; and in the course of my expulsion the Genius of
Muskegon was finally separated from her author.  To
continue to possess a full-sized statue, a man must
have a studio, a gallery, or at least the freedom of a
back-garden.  He cannot carry it about with him, like a
satchel, in the bottom of a cab, nor can he cohabit in
a garret ten by fifteen with so momentous a companion.
It was my first idea to leave her behind at my
departure.  There, in her birthplace, she might lend an
inspiration, methought, to my successor.  But the
proprietor, with whom I had unhappily quarrelled,
seized the occasion to be disagreeable, and called upon
me to remove my property.  For a man in such straits as
I now found myself, the hire of a lorry was a
consideration; and yet even that I could have faced, if
I had had anywhere to drive to after it was hired.
Hysterical laughter seized upon me as I beheld (in
imagination) myself, the waggoner, and the Genius of
Muskegon, standing in the public view of Paris, without
the shadow of a destination; perhaps driving at last to
the nearest rubbish-heap, and dumping there, among the
ordures of a city, the beloved child of my invention.
From these extremities I was relieved by a seasonable
offer, and I parted from the Genius of Muskegon for
thirty francs.  Where she now stands, under what name
she is admired or criticised, history does not inform
us; but I like to think she may adorn the shrubbery of
some suburban tea-garden, where holiday shop-girls hang
their hats upon the mother, and their swains (by way of
an approach of gallantry) identify the winged infant
with the god of love.

In a certain cabman's eating-house on the outer
boulevard I got credit for my midday meal.  Supper I
was supposed not to require, sitting down nightly to
the delicate table of some rich acquaintances.  This
arrangement was extremely ill-considered.  My fable,
credible enough at first, and so long as my clothes
were in good order, must have seemed worse than
doubtful after my coat became frayed about the edges,
and my boots began to squelch and pipe along the
restaurant floors.  The allowance of one meal a day,
besides, though suitable enough to the state of my
finances, agreed poorly with my stomach.  The
restaurant was a place I had often visited
experimentally, to taste the life of students then more
unfortunate than myself; and I had never in those days
entered it without disgust, or left it without nausea.
It was strange to find myself sitting down with
avidity, rising up with satisfaction, and counting the
hours that divided me from my return to such a table.
But hunger is a great magician; and so soon as I had
spent my ready cash, and could no longer fill up on
bowls of chocolate or hunks of bread, I must depend
entirely on that cabman's eating-house, and upon
certain rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls.
Dijon (for instance) might get paid for some of his
pot-boiling work, or else an old friend would pass
through Paris; and then I would be entertained to a
meal after my own soul, and contract a Latin Quarter
loan, which would keep me in tobacco and my morning
coffee for a fortnight.  It might be thought the latter
would appear the more important.  It might be supposed
that a life, led so near the confines of actual famine,
should have dulled the nicety of my palate.  On the
contrary, the poorer a man's diet, the more sharply is
he set on dainties.  The last of my ready cash, about
thirty francs, was deliberately squandered on a single
dinner; and a great part of my time when I was alone
was passed upon the details of imaginary feasts.

One gleam of hope visited me--an order for a bust from
a rich Southerner.  He was free-handed, jolly of
speech, merry of countenance; kept me in good-humour
through the sittings, and, when they were over, carried
me off with him to dinner and the sights of Paris.  I
ate well, I laid on flesh; by all accounts I made a
favourable likeness of the being, and I confess I
thought my future was assured.  But when the bust was
done, and I had despatched it across the Atlantic, I
could never so much as learn of its arrival.  The blow
felled me; I should have lain down and tried no stroke
to right myself, had not the honour of my country been
involved.  For Dijon improved the opportunity in the
European style, informing me (for the first time) of
the manners of America: how it was a den of banditti,
without the smallest rudiment of law or order, and
debts could be there only collected with a shot-gun.
"The whole world knows it," he would say; "you are
alone, MON PETIT Loudon--you are alone, to be in
ignorance of these facts.  The judges of the Supreme
Court fought but the other day with stilettos on the
bench at Cincinnati.  You should read the little book
of one of my friends, LE TOURISTE DANS LE FAR-WEST,
you will see it all there in good French." At last,
incensed by days of such discussion, I undertook to
prove to him the contrary, and put the affair in the
hands of my late father's lawyer.  From him I had the
gratification of hearing, after a due interval, that my
debtor was dead of the yellow fever in Key West, and
had left his affairs in some confusion.  I suppress his
name; for though he treated me with cruel nonchalance,
it is probable he meant to deal fairly in the end.

Soon after this a shade of change in my reception at
the cabman's eating-house marked the beginning of a new
phase in my distress.  The first day I told myself it
was but fancy; the next, I made quite sure it was a
fact; the third, in mere panic I stayed away, and went
for forty-eight hours fasting.  This was an act of
great unreason; for the debtor who stays away is but
the more remarked, and the boarder who misses a meal is
sure to be accused of infidelity.  On the fourth day,
therefore, I returned, inwardly quaking.  The
proprietor looked askance upon my entrance; the
waitresses (who were his daughters) neglected my wants,
and sniffed at the affected joviality of my
salutations; last, and most plain, when I called for a
SUISSE (such as was being served to all the other
diners), I was bluntly told there were no more.  It was
obvious I was near the end of my tether; one plank
divided me from want, and now I felt it tremble.  I
passed a sleepless night, and the first thing in the
morning took my way to Myner's studio.  It was a step I
had long me