of two-hundred pounds a year; and they could become bankrupt for four-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty pounds with one-hundred-and-eighty pounds worth of assets. But I,--I could not get my due from that man, one of whose secretaries wrote his business to me on the franked note-paper of the late Queen of England's Treasury: while the other, the bankrupt, gave me a winter of starvation, because his lord had altered his mind, quoth he, about the job on which I was working, and had determined to put his money into a cathedral. No. I never accomplished the whole art and mystery of mendicity. I perfectly could see what was required of him who would be a successful swindler. I was not that one. I was playing another kind of game--unfortunately an honest one. Take that 'unfortunately' for irony, please. I mean--but you perfectly know what I mean.--I made nothing of my inventions. By degrees, I had the mortification of seeing others arrive at the discovery which I had made years before. They contrived to turn it into gold and fame. That way, one after another of my inventions became nulled to me. I think I am right in saying that there are only four remaining at the present moment. Finance them now? Engage in trade like a monk or a nun? No. No. I shall give them to--that doesn't matter. It shall be done to-day.--Idle? Idle? When I think of all the violently fatuous frantic excellent things I've done in the course of my struggles for an honest living--ouf! It makes me sick! Oh yes, I have been helped. God forgive me for bedaubing myself with that indelible blur. I had not the courage to sit-down and fold my hands and die. A brute once said that he supposed that I looked upon the world as mine oyster. I did not. I worked; and I wanted my wages. When they were withheld, people encouraged me to hope on; and offered me a guinea for the present. I took the filthy guinea. God forgive me for becoming so degraded. Not because I wanted to take it: but because they said that they would be so pained at my refusal. But one can't pay all one's debts, and lead a godly righteous sober life for ever after on a guinea. I was offered help: but help in teaspoonfuls: just enough to keep me alive and chained in the mire: never enough to enable me to raise myself out of it. I asked for work, and they gave me a guinea,--and a tacit request to go and agonize elsewhere. My weakness, my fault was that I did not die murdered at Maryvale, at St. Andrew's College. The normal man, treated as I was ill-treated, would have made no bones whatever about doing so. But I was abnormal. I took help, when it was offered gently. I'm thankful to say that I flung it back when it was offered charitably, as the Bishop of Claughton offered it, and Monsignor--you know whom I mean, Talacryn,--and John Newcastle of the _Weekly Tabule_. I'll tell you about the last. He said that, being anxious to do me a good turn, he had deposited ten