"Many of these people," he said,--but said it solely and silently to himself,--"are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even when they're not they're out of the current, as it were; they haven't headway; and so they never--or seldom ever--see any way to make money except somehow in connection with the plantations. There's no end of chances here to a man that's got money-sense, and nerve to use it." He wrote that to Zosephine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at what expense, to bring it there, and brought it. "Give me the gains other men pass by," he said, "and I'll be satisfied. The saying is, 'Buy wisdom;' but I sell mine. I like to sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an adventure. And if there's any thing I love, it's an adventure with money in it! But even that isn't my chief pleasure: my chief pleasure's the study of human nature. 'The proper study of mankind is man. * * * * * Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.'" This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr. Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "Isn't that what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would respond, "Yes, that's so." And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were thinking that at least he might know it was his treat. Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him. "He didn't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he hadn't decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move." The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled, free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition.