whom I talked in the early darkness of an autumn evening in the middle of the Atlantic, with the appalling loneliness of the sea as night came down to meet it in mystery, and the smoke from the funnels trailed up off to the southwest on a rising and sinister wind; he told me of his mother and his uncle--“who makes his five guineas a week and doesn’t know the taste of liquor”--and of his little ambitions, and so, after a bit, of the mysteries of life, with a perfect _camaraderie_, as we stood there leaning over the rail, and then, suddenly, when we parted, invested himself with a wholly different manner, and touched his cap in a little salute and left me to the inanities of the smoking-room. It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in those curious meetings down in the darker quarter of the town, where the waste of the city lifted up faces that were seared and scarred with the appalling catastrophes of the soul that had somehow befallen them, and there was unutterable longing there. The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility. And these were the people! These were they who had been so long proscribed and exploited; they had borne a few of the favored of the fates on their backs, and yet, bewildered, they were somehow expectant of that good to come to them which had been promised in the words and phrases by which their very acquiescence and subjugation had so mysteriously been wrought--“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”