H

E was a shabby, little, middle-aged man-one of that innumerable host whose dull, irresolute faces and lax, lethargic bodies pathetically publish them as failures. And the unkemptness of his rusty, gray hair, the dinginess of his coarse skin, the uncleanness of his blunt finger-tips, the stains on his threadbare coat lapels, and the grimy glaze on his linen, all were symptoms expressing poignantly his apathetic acquiescence in that destiny. In that struggle for which fate had prepared him, in mind and spirit, so inefficiently he had been long since well beaten into a pattern for submission and drudgery. Now, at last, he was irrevocably a poor machine, none too accurate even for small performances, doing whatever task was set for him by those who, because they were everything that he was not, controlled his mean and trifling fortunes.

All day long he worked in a big room full of desks and active young men, where the clerical business of a great factory was done. His tasks were calculated to require little of the spirit of enterprise and alertness which characterized this place. In an atmosphere of eagerness and sharpness, he moved about his petty employments quite unaffected by it. Sometimes, upon indiscriminating strangers, his dulness imposed as calmness, his lethargy as deliberation, his bulging brow-the peculiarly salient, deceptive brow of so many futile souls-as an evidence of capability suppressed. To such casual, myopic observers he seemed to be a man who had not been given a proper chancea man inappropriately employed. For he ruled forms, filed unimportant papers, distributed or stamped letters, kept the desks in order, did whatever the time of the keen, young clerks was too valuable to be wasted A boy could have done nearly all that he did, and, by the deadly accuracy of his employers' judgment, he received nearly as little as a boy's wages.

on.

In the evening, when all the clerks had gone and he had put the big office to rights, he would begin inevitably to think of his own home-going and, consequently, of his wife.

His wife! How often he had expressed to himself in incoherent terms, at such moments as that, what a travesty on proper reward for all his long days' effort were those home-comings of his to her!

It was part of his little tragedy that, as though at his making he had been half intended for better uses, he should be able vaguely to appreciate the values of what other people had and he was missing. What should be, even among the people of whose especial class he was, the legitimate expectation at such an hour, with home in view? Simple, warm coziness, without a doubt; a soothing sense of snugness engendered of pleasant, tranquil companionship in cheerful setting. But what, in place of that, had he to anticipate?

He always knew exactly how he would find his wife: at the stove in the kitchen of their gloomy little flat, her face blotched and shining from the heat of frying food, her thin hair stringing down around her coarse, creased neck, her shapeless figure wrapped in a faded and stained working dress. And he always anticipated

even the expression with which she would receive him at his home-coming; an expression of recognition without welcome, signifying an almost sullen acceptance of his presence-as though. in her opinion, there was in him some constant. subtle cause for resentment and hostility.

What could be the solution of this furtively hostile riddle which was so apt to appear in his wife's eyes as soon as she turned them on him?

He had too little intuition or capacity for seeing even. himself clearly to find the answer. But he could understand that something intangible was, nowadays, always between them-something that she, who had so evidently raised it up herself, seemed always with curious, wicked injustice to be blaming him for.

Whatever, unconsciously or not, she meant by this, how blighting an effect it had on him, coming home with timorous aspirations toward peace and tranquillity, always to be so greeted! That maddening look of hers -sometimes he almost fixed it as a sort of tired contempt-would fill him with a weak, bewildering rage. The strange inequity of it! He would get swiftly a desire to retaliate for it upon the one person in the world on whom he could feel perfectly safe in retaliating. Then, casting about for means of retaliation, he would most easily find them just in seeing her as she was, with clear, spiteful eyes. He would see her as she was after all the years they had lived together in absolute, gross intimacy, without any appreciation of the saving quality of carefully preserved ideals, having destroyed every illusion. There would be no little repulsive detail in her conduct or appearance that he would not remember and observe, that he would not mark vindictively. And his reprisal would come when she would see-and she could not help seeing-written on his face, his comprehension of her stale state of degeneration and his repugnance at it. It was through his expressed contempt for her existing self, aged, grown slatternly and ugly, become something that he had never bargained for, that he would strike back at her. It was not by ingenious understanding, but just instinctively that he had come across this weapon for revenge. If he had known how terrible a weapon it

was!

office or, rather, of those in it. And now, at this unusual call for him, presaging he could not guess what act of theirs, for an instant he was really frightened. He felt the acute fright of a pcor and defenseless person whose unstable, trivial fortunes are suddenly menaced. Suppose that they had all at once found him in some way inefficient or too old for their full profit! Suppose that they were actually going to turn him out, aghast, to walk the streets!

Hat in hand, he shuffled to the open door, having on his face that wide-eyed, flaccid expression of humility and anxiety which aging, inept dependents take into the presence of powerful employers.

In the bright private office there was but one person: the owner of the factory. He was sitting tipped back in his chair beside a large, glistening desk, smoking, with the air of a man who has finished satisfactorily his sort of day's work. His calm face indicated, for the employee in the doorway, strange qualities such as unvarying self-possession, self-confidence, and competency. Innumerable details which made up his immaculate appearance hinted at an extraordinary, felicitous existence amid other surroundings of unguessed luxury and attractiveness. Expressing, by every visible characteristic, the idea of unlimited possession, ability, and power, he was the sort of being for one quite without possessions, or ability, or power even over himself, to be properly afraid of. When he began to speak, the other held his breath, prepared by his extravagant and senseless trepidation for any dire announcement.

The employee was told that there was an errand to be done at once which had been forgotten until every one else had gone. It related to some repairs being made in his employer's house from the factory. There were some measurements, necessary for the completion of the work, to be got before morning. He was rapidly and clearly instructed in their nature and was told to make them on his way home that evening, and to give them to a foreman the first thing next day. He received the address and money for car fare. In another moment he found himself in the hall.

As he stumbled down the factory steps and set off on his errand, his nervous reaction from fear affected him peculiarly. At once, half realizing the absurdity and the shame of his emotion, he began to hate the man before whom he had been forced to feel it. He hated that calm, rich man for those intangible qualities in contemplating which he had felt so pitiably helpless. He hated him for everything differentiating which he had-even for his personal appearance, for his physical immaculateness and fineness. He hated him as the embodiment of his class; of that class which, as he had always implicitl believed, from a position of luxurious ease inexorably drives the poor and defenseless hither and thither in deep-worn ruts of toil, to pile up its illimitable profits.

These thoughts of his seemed, as he went on his way, to attract toward him for his notice countless tangible examples of the conditions which he was hating. For now, having left the rough factory streets

behind, through clangorous, feverish zones of business and pleasure mingled, he came into the particular regions of the rich.

There, in an evening mist made luminous by glittering lamps and the brilliant façades of wonderful hotels and shops, he moved like a man in a strange, superior land, bewildered, oppressed by a sense of his own miserable insignificance. That was, perhaps, the worst of his condition; that he was not permitted to view these things with the unappreciating, childlike wonder which is the unsuspected blessing of so many of the lowly. The poor metal of his brain oddly contained of better stuff just enough for his dejection; so that even from his place he could look up, half-comprehendingly, at this strange, inaccessible existence and envy bitterly. So, the clatter of extravagant traffic tangled in the broad avenue, the dazing glimpses, caught through carriage windows, of beautifully perfect women, his occasional contact with the tide of well-clothed, alien beings that flowed about him, the very crisp air, scented by winter flowers and perfumes, filled him with a despondent sense of privation. And, at his despondency, there smoldered in him a hot envy for all this heartless, cruel, greedy race into whose especial country he was intruding. How bitter a commentary on injustice he was among them-beaten after long years' futile struggling for just a little of what they had never wanted for and would never relinquish, in the smallest part, for such as he. Ah, the ghastly, wicked inhumanity of the conditions that allowed it!

He stared about him with no definite comprehension of the suggestive details in those decorations; the extensive, soft-colored rugs shining on the stone floor, the massive, ancient fountain-basin in the midst of the hall, the few great paintings on the wooden walls, or the bulky, green-bronze group of consummately molded figures at the base of the wide staircase. His impression was merely of the unexpected, unnecessary vastness and richness of the place which for him in his ignorance assumed a sort of splendid, public quality, as though it might be the foyer of some elaborate hotelas though, indeed, it could not reasonably be part of a private house.

The servant led him hastily up the polished stairway to a second story, no less largely beautiful, and as deserted. In an ample, golden-brown place where soft firelight was reflected from countless gilded backs of books and blankly shining picture glasses, he set to work at his measurements, the servant watching him impatiently. And he worked hurriedly on his own account; for all the strange grandeur of this place filled him with confused uneasiness, as though it formed an environment in which he had no right-in which, in fact, by his presence he was effecting something reprehensible.

With his task nearly finished and escape at hand, all at once in the silence he heard behind him a soft, suggestive rustling and then a little, low,, feminine exclamation of surprise. Turning involuntarily, he saw in the doorway, looking at him, a lady.

A MAID, leading him back through a narrow hall, passed him on to a man servant whom-at first sight of his tall, correctly clothed figure-the intruder took for a gentleman. This imposing domestic heard the other's errand with an air of reluctance and disfavor and then told him coldly, as though he were

is a very inopportune time; my husband, perhaps, forgot-'

The man folded his rule and notes with haste and picked his rusty hat from the floor.

"I am all through, lady," he answered, huskily, and stood waiting timidly for her to step from the doorway. she At once her slight expression of irritation faded; turned indifferently and left the room with a slow, barely undulating step.

"See him out," she said over her snowy shoulder to the servant. "Open the library windows before you go down." The intruder, following into the hall, came into air faintly perfumed with some strange, sweet, very subtle As he deodor, which lingered where she had been. scended the stairs he began to remember, in little flashes, amazing details of her that his mind had been able, half-unconsciously, to grasp. He remembered the exquisite smoothness and color of her cheeks and throat, the white beauty of her shoulders and breast that he had in some way comprehended without daring to look at directly. He remembered the splendor of her slim, ring-laden fingers. He remembered the illusion of youthfulness in her figure as she left the room, trailing her soft, clinging, frostily-rosy skirts, undulating just perceptibly. He began to remember all her half-apprehendable perfection which actually made her seem to him, weighed by his inadequate measures of experience, hardly a woman.

The cold air struck his forehead and neck, hot and moist from his late confusion. The door was slammed shut behind him. He looked up and about with the manner of a man suddenly waking out of unrealities. Slowly he set out for home.

AS he went, at once inevitably there occurred to him a comparison between the place he was leaving and that to which he was now going; between the woman he had just seen and the one he would see presently. Two images stood suddenly before him in cruel contrast: the images of his employer's wife and of his own.

The difference in that comparison, as vast as in every other between his condition and his employer's, affected him terribly by what he would have termed its injustice. Both of them, he reflected, after all just men, the one had everything that signified contentment and

responsible for being there, that he had chosen a very bad time. "How long will you be?" the servant inquired bruskly. "At any rate, you will have to cut it short. There's a dinner party to-night and you must get out of here before any one arrives." He preceded the other quickly through a door and into the main part of the house.

At once the stranger stepped, with a thrill of amazement, into a region of extraordinary and stately beauty.

faced, coarse, nowadays repulsive even to him, ready to greet him with her old look of mean, perpetual hostility. At that moment, his whole weak nature crying out against the cruelty of it all, how he loathed her, for her part among the instruments of his punishment!

Punishment!

But what had he done to

deserve his punishment?

That was, he thought then, the worst of it; there was no justice at all in a world where such conditions were possible. By the only doctrine which he knew-the illogical doctrine which teaches the poor how to envy and to hate illogically-this was the intolerable thing: that the rich should be able to take everything, and such as he, striving pathetically for so little, nothing. How vividly that villainous wrong stood out before his eyes to-night, on his realizing all the tremendous difference between his employer's fortunes and his own, between their homes, their wives, everything-even themselves.

He stopped in the street as this thought seized him. Yes, between themselves, too. He was not thinking then of their differences of clothing and cleanliness, of education and refinement. He was thinking of something beyond these things, setting him and his employer unalterably far apart-something which he was trying to identify. . . . His mind, unadapted for any consecutive reasoning, seized clumsily on this new idea and began to grapple with it.

He remembered his employer as he had seen him in his private office, still at his post after every one else had gone-surely a poor figure from which to draw an example of idleness rewarded with criminal prodigality. His was a face fashioned in a superior mold. Power and ability and perfect self-reliance were written on it too clearly ever to have replaced other sorts of lineaments erased. Those qualities, so expressed, had surely not grown up with that man's good fortune. Surely he had been born with them. Surely they had urged him to become what he was; they had been responsible for that, had done that for him.

There, at last, through a rift in the dark obscuration of unreasoning class hatred, shone the answer to everything. While some men came into the world with such spirit, in their faces, there could be nothing in common between them and such as this poor man. Their sort must gain everything and his must work in little, futile ways forever and gain nothing. That innate difference-that tragedy of fate's capricious handicap of brain and spirit-that was the answer.

Walking on slowly, he remembered, in dismal corroboration of this, how everything he had ever undertaken, in all his life, had failed. He remembered how everything with which he had ever had personally to do had been infected by his own perpetual failure. It had been so always, with all his associations, with the woman he had brought into his life

Ah! What was he seeing now? He was seeing his. wife, in a form for a long time strange to him and nearly forgotten. He was seeing her as she had been in that brief, almost unbelievable period marked by their wedding day.

He remembered: she had been young and fresh; her mind had then been largely still unformed; her character had been still untrained. She had been the

He reached his own door and went in

plastic material from which-how terrible to realize it almost anything might have been fashioned!

And he, all their life together, had been dragging her down with him through the gloomy paths of his puerile, profitless career. If she had begun then with heedless, youthful certainty of the future, with vague, but trustful, young optimism, how long had it taken to show her the mistake of that, to wear such tenuous things out, to give her, in place of them, all their antitheses? With him she had lost them so quickly, so long ago, that only now, with a quick pang, had he remembered them.

What was she now? She had grown too early middleaged and ugly under worry, slovenly and gross under hardship, querulous and bitter under misfortune. She was what he had made her:

He had made her so. He had made her what, but

a little while ago, he had loathed her for being.

1

His wife! That long-forgotten mental pic-: ture of her stood out before him: the picture of her as she had been at the beginning when, under the protection of such a man as his. employer, might she not have approached in large degree, through ease and prosperity and cultivation, the image of such a woman as his employer's wife? If that was so, ah, the mortal injury that all these years he had. been doing her!

FINALLY, all his numbing thoughts ar

ranged, he came miserably into that familiar region, crowded, strident, dirty, and malodorous, where he lived. He reached his. tenement and climbed the soiled, littered stairs, through air rank with odors of cooking food and of uncleanly living. He reached his own door and, pushing it slowly open, went in.

But when he saw her, exactly as he had. pictured her in that contrast with his employer's wife, with every unlovely detail of! her appearance cruelly evident, he stopped: in the doorway, staring at her wretchedly.. He was staring at all that he had done.

She rose from the kitchen chair in which she had been waiting for him, glanced swiftly at the clock, and then turned to him a face. full of irritable, indignant inquiry.

.."

But he stood still and mute, struck so by the look that had preceded that one-a look of real relief, for one instant illuminating her face as he, appearing at last, had quieted her apprehension at his long lateness. The old, familiar greeting he had expected-and he had analyzed it now, and knew what bitter, hopeless, and just thoughts must be behind it. But that first, unconscious look which he had found to-night in place of it-that flash of unguessed solicitude-melted all his numb apprehension. It drove him, stumbling forward to her, with a face tremulous, chaotic; with his fingers involuntarily reaching out for her in a gesture which for a long time. he had forgotten. He took her in his arms; he smothered her struggling amazement with a sudden, weak convulsion of dry sobs. In a cracking voice, striving to express for her his piercing realization, he cried: "My wife. My poor wife. Could it have been merely a contagion of emotion which leaped from him to ravage her susceptible, feminine nature? Peculiarly her mouth, in a swift, sympathetic response, was suddenly contorted as though from pain. And then, going all limp, she clung to him, her coarse hands clutching his threadbare shoulders, her unkempt hair pressed against his cheek. Their sobs, their bungling motions, were incoherent. Perhaps even their agitation was to them, just then, inexplicable, roused they knew not how and shaking them they knew not to what purpose. But at that sudden, mutual crumbling into emotion, all at once miraculously all their long bitterness and all their cruel, recriminative thoughts were gone. All in an instant those unexpected, unfamiliar tears swept away the sullen barriers between them-the angry sense of rights and wrongs, the wanton injuries and ghastly processes of retaliation. And perhaps, after all, gifted then divinely with a golden intuition, each saw, without a word needed to explain, all of the other's tragedy standing in brimming eyes, and finally understood.

T

WO years' residence with the Emperor of New Jersey tired me of royal pomp and ceremony. His Majesty, although a cultivated man, was a bit partial to reading the Congressional Record aloud to me of evenings, and he often commanded me to commit to memory the census and agricultural statistics, which he never missed delivering with a fine intonation. As we dined very heavily at the palace, I frequently went to sleep during these readings, and was awakened rudely to find his Majesty sitting on my chest and brandishing his sceptre in my face as he shouted in a loud and fearsome voice: "How many immigrants past the age of fifty died of coffee-drinking in Cincinnati during the month of June, 1901 ?"

And he would hold me in the above described humiliating attitude until I had guessed the number mentioned in the Congressional Record, when he would release me and continue his reading. This practise so affected and depressed me that I at last resolved upon escape, and spent hours every day signaling in vain to the automobiles of passing peasants who went honking indifferently on toward the golf links of Hackensack.

Finally, however, my lucky chance arrived. The Emperor called me to his throne and commanded me harshly t to run over to the shop across the way and buy him ten sticks of wintergreen chewing gum. hastened to comply, but no sooner had I quit the palace gate than I availed myself of the opportunity and used

I

the Emperor's nickel to buy myself a ticket to a large, fat ferryboat which I saw straining at her moorings preparing for departure. As soon as the boat was safely in mid-stream, I took occasion to ask some of the passengers whither we were bound, but they merely looked at me with their strange wild eyes and answered: "Rubber!" which I did not understand at the time, but afterward learned meant: "Beware of rude and idle questionings" in the sweet, fluent dialect of the Hurrilegs or inhabitants of Manhattan Island.

After a short trip our vessel came in port at New. York, the Enchanted City of the Hurrilegs, and, immediately upon landing, our passengers, many of whom were inhabitants, became affected with the curious run