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Transcriber's notes:

  Fixed typographical error: In page 427 "that he returned somehow to
  San Francisco and died in the hosiptal." was changed to "that he
  returned somehow to San Francisco and died in the HOSPITAL."

  Text following a carat character (^) was superscript in the original
  (example: a^2).

       THE WORKS OF

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

     SWANSTON EDITION
       VOLUME XIII

  _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
  Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
  STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
  have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
  Copies are for sale._

  _This is No._ ...........

[Illustration: THE BACK VERANDAH AT VAILIMA]

  THE WORKS OF

  ROBERT LOUIS
   STEVENSON

  VOLUME THIRTEEN

  LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
  WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
  AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
  HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
  AND COMPANY         MDCCCCXII

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

THE WRECKER

  PROLOGUE

                                                           PAGE
    IN THE MARQUESAS                                          5

  THE YARN

    CHAPTER
        I. A SOUND COMMERCIAL EDUCATION                      19

      II. ROUSSILLON WINE                                    32

     III. TO INTRODUCE MR. PINKERTON                         43

      IV. IN WHICH I EXPERIENCE EXTREMES OF FORTUNE          58

       V. IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS             71

      VI. IN WHICH I GO WEST                                 86

    VII. IRONS IN THE FIRE: _Opes Strepitumque_             102

   VIII. FACES ON THE CITY FRONT                            126

     IX. THE WRECK OF THE _FLYING SCUD_                     139

      X. IN WHICH THE CREW VANISH                           154

     XI. IN WHICH JIM AND I TAKE DIFFERENT WAYS             179

    XII. THE _NORAH CREINA_                                 194

   XIII. THE ISLAND AND THE WRECK                           210

    XIV. THE CABIN OF THE _FLYING SCUD_                     222

     XV. THE CARGO OF THE _FLYING SCUD_                     237

    XVI. IN WHICH I TURN SMUGGLER, AND THE CAPTAIN CASUIST  251

   XVII. LIGHT FROM THE MAN OF WAR                          264

  XVIII. CROSS-QUESTIONS AND CROOKED ANSWERS                278

    XIX. TRAVELS WITH A SHYSTER                             294

     XX. STALLBRIDGE-LE-CARTHEW                             317

    XXI. FACE TO FACE                                       330

   XXII. THE REMITTANCE MAN                                 338

  XXIII. THE BUDGET OF THE _CURRENCY LASS_                  363

   XXIV. A HARD BARGAIN                                     388

    XXV. A BAD BARGAIN                                      402

  EPILOGUE

    TO WILL H. LOW                                          427

THE WRECKER

WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH

LLOYD OSBOURNE

PROLOGUE

THE WRECKER

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
beflagged 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 bière?_"

But Prince Stanila Moanatini, the only reasonably busy human creature on
the island, was riding hotspur 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 hardwood 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
centrepiece 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 versâ_) he had brought
with him from further south the end of some story which had begun in
Tai-o-hae. Among other matters 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 clubmen.

"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 tablecloth; 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 black-mailing, 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 Cæsar 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
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 entrusted 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
_Comédie 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'Étoile 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 Bohème_ (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been
produced at the Odéon, 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 riverside, 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
side-walk 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 Café 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 café 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 pre-occupation--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 downstairs 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
fallen 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 Fouché 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.

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
_débutant_, 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 downstairs?" 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 am 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.

"_Monsieur se sent mal au coeur d'avoir trop regardé votre croûte_,"[2]
said I, and made my escape, scarce with dignity, at Pinkerton's heels.

"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 St. 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 carcass; 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 St. Jo. The
editor did no more than glance his eye down the head-lines. '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.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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-_aîné_, and Stennis-_frère_, 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.

"_Hé! quoi?_" cried he, relapsing into French. "_Qu'est-ce que vous me
chantez là?_ O, in América," he added, on further information being
hastily furnished. "That is anozer sing. O, véry good--véry 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 "Fénnimore 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 already 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 café, 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 eyeglass 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 _rôle_ 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 it's 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 café,
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 meditated and long refrained from; for I was scarce intimate with
the Englishman; and though I knew him to possess plenty of money,
neither his manner nor his reputation were the least encouraging to
beggars.

I found him at work on a picture, which I was able conscientiously to
praise, dressed in his usual tweeds--plain, but pretty fresh, and
standing out in disagreeable contrast to my own withered and degraded
outfit. As we talked, he continued to shift his eyes watchfully between
his handiwork and the fat model, who sat at the far end of the studio in
a state of nature, with one arm gallantly arched above her head. My
errand would have been difficult enough under the best of circumstances: