but he was then out; and so far as I am concerned he is out still. I am out myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he was to repay me from the money for his eviction article. He never wrote it, apparently; and perhaps his experience of eviction lacked the vital element of reality. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for he was an Englishman, and the Englishmen are all romanticists. VIII. I was at one time worked for a period of years by a German-born veteran of our war, whom I was called out to see one night from dinner, when I was full of good cheer, and, of course, quite helpless against a case of want like his. He represented that he was the victim of an infirmity brought on by falling from a burning bridge under the rebel fire, and was liable to be overtaken by it at any moment; and he showed me all sorts of surgeons’ certificates in proof of the fact, as well as kindly notes from college professors and clergymen. I had, therefore, a double motive for befriending him. I had as little wish that he should be overtaken by his infirmity in my reception-room as that he should go on sleeping in unfinished houses and basement areas; and so I gave him some money at once. He was to have his pension money at the end of the month, and till then he said he could live on what I gave him. I hurried him out of the house as fast as I could, for I did not feel safe from his infirmity while he was there. But he kept coming back, and always, in view of his threatening infirmity, got money from me; I am not sure that I always pitied him so much. At last he agreed to seek refuge in a soldiers’ home, upon my urgence, and I lost sight of him for several years. When he reappeared, one summer, at the seaside, as destitute as ever, and as threatening as ever in regard to his infirmity, it seemed that he had passed the time in working his way from one soldiers’ home to another, in Maine and in New York, in Virginia and in Ohio, but everywhere, because of some informality in his papers, the gates were closed against him. I gave him a suit of clothes and some more money, and I thought I had done with him at last, for he said that now, as soon as he got his next pension money, he was going home to Germany, to spend his last years with his brother,--a surgeon, retired from the German army,--who could take care of him and his infirmity, and they could live cheaply together, upon their joint pensions. I applauded so wise a plan, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Two or three months later, after I had come from the seaside place, where he visited me, to New York for the winter, he presented himself again to me. Heaven knows how he had found me out, but there he was, with his infirmity, and his story was that now he had money enough to buy his steamer ticket to Hamburg, but that he lacked his railroad fare from Hamburg to the little village where his brother lived. His notion seemed to be that I should subscribe with others to