my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess it’s a bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour I’ve got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other time, if you consent, we’ll have a go at it, such as it is, together. Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and tried to commit the ‘points’ of our case to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by heart as a boy. I dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake up some fine morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of an English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England on business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful mess (not that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal practitioner in our courts, a very rough diamond, but with a great deal of _flair_, as they say in New York. It was with him yesterday you saw me dining. He undertook, as he called it, to ‘nose round’ and see if anything could be made of our questionable but possible show. The matter had never seriously been taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons assuring me that it seemed a very good show indeed and that he should be greatly surprised if I were unable to do something. This was the greatest push I had ever got in my life; I took a deliberate step, for the first time; I sailed for England. I’ve been here three days: they’ve seemed three months. After keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours my legal adviser makes his appearance last night and states to me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I haven’t a leg to stand on, that my claim is moonshine, and that I must do penance and take a ticket for six more days of purgatory with his presence thrown in. My friend, my friend--shall I say I was disappointed? I’m already resigned. I didn’t really believe I had any case. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the crowning illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor legal adviser!--I forgive him with all my heart. But for him I shouldn’t be sitting in this place, in this air, under these impressions. This is a world I could have got on with beautifully. There’s an immense charm in its having been kept for the last. After it nothing else would have been tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, which won’t be long enough for it to “go back on me. There’s one thing!”--and here, pausing, he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him--“I wish it were possible you should be with me to the end.” “I promise you to leave you only when you kick me downstairs.” But I suggested my terms. “It must be on condition of your omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavour of mortality. I know nothing of ‘ends.’ I’m all for beginnings.” He kept on me his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: “Don’t cut down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I’m bankrupt.”