gang-plank with the mien of a hero, of a barbarian who knew himself to be greater than the civilization he invaded.  I was possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor.  At last I knew what it was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial palace.  People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this mortal be?  I was superior to convention, and the very garb which otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation.  And all this was due, not to my royal lineage, nor to the deeds I had done and the champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin.  The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the æsthetic mind; but it was plethoric.  There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness.  Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I should have reached the sky.

And this was my royal progress through that most loyal city.  I purchased a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and diversions as befitted one who had long been denied.  I scattered my gold lavishly, nor did I chaffer over prices in mart or exchange.  And, because of these things I did, I demanded homage.  Nor was it refused.  I moved through wind-swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades, lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval.  Money was very good, I thought, and for the time was content.  But there rushed upon me the words of Erasmus, “When I get some money I shall buy me some Greek books, and afterwards some clothes,” and a great shame wrapped me around.  But, luckily for my soul’s welfare, I reflected and was saved.  By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire-flashing, heaven-born, while I—I was merely a clay-born, a son of earth.  For a giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered.  And I rolled over on my greensward, caught a glimpse of a regiment of undulating backs, and thanked my particular gods that such moods of madness were passing brief.

But on another day, receiving with kingly condescension the service of my good subjects’ backs, I remembered the words of another man, long since laid away, who was by birth a nobleman, by nature a philosopher and a gentleman, and who by circumstance yielded up his head upon the block.  “That a man of lead,” he once remarked, “who has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good men to serve him, only because he has a great heap of that metal; and that if, by some accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as great changes as chance itself), all this wealth should pass from the master to the meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very soon become one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth, and so was bound to follow its fortune.”

And when I had remembered this much, I unwisely failed to pause and reflect.  So I gathered my belongings together, cinched my hogskin belt tight about me, and went away to my own country.  It was a very foolish thing to do.  I am sure it was.  But when I had recovered my reason, I fell upon my particular gods and berated them mightily, and as penance for their watchlessness placed them away amongst dust and cobwebs.  Oh no, not for long.  They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.

It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man’s footsteps as he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well.  Without the bitter one may not know the sweet.  The other day—nay, it was but yesterday—I fell before the rhythm of fortune.  The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need.  The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.  From my window I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages.  I thought: Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours—the nitrogenic—why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root and runner—but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested.  His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow, then on to mine.  And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate.  “Unstable as water,” he said (I am sure he did)—“unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.  Man, where are your cabbages?”

I shrank back.  Then I waxed rebellious.  I refused to answer the question.  He had no right to ask it, and his presence was an affront upon the landscape.  And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was stiffened, my head poised.  I gathered together certain certificates of goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and journeyed townward.  I was yet a man.  There was naught in those certificates to be ashamed of.  But alack-a-day!  While my heels thrust the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering, like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity—men, women, and children without end.  They had no concern with me, nor I with them.  I knew it; I felt it.  Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the world, I dwindled in my own sight.  My feet were uncertain and heavy, and my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the middle.  People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully.  (I can swear they did.)  In every eye I read the question, Man, where are your cabbages?

So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive glances directing my progress.  At last I came hard by the place, and peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.  ‘Fore God!  I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man, nor did I contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil.  Why?  I do not know, save that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being devoid of the one I was destitute of the other.  The person I sought practised a profession as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative.  It is mentioned in Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day.  Nor is it unfair to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to final balance.

Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit, that I entered the Presence.  To confess that I was shocked were to do my feelings an injustice.  Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock, Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of individual.  This man—why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue, with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the normal pallor of sedentary existence.  He was reading a book, sober and leather-bound, while on his finely moulded, intellectual head reposed a black skull-cap.  For all the world his look and attitude were those of a college professor.  My heart gave a great leap.  Here was hope!  But no; he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed.  I communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery.  His nerve centres of judgment and will have