AS he turned away from St. Jermyn’s schoolroom, after putting his mother and Miss Vanbrugh into their carriage, Lord Alistair Stuart made a curious discovery. Thrusting his hands into his pocket in the act of nodding to a cabdriver, he found that he had no money. The brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay had often known what it was to want a thousand pounds, but he had never been without sovereigns in his pocket, and it took him some moments to realize that this state of things was not accidental, but natural in his new circumstances. Much to his own surprise, he felt the first cold touch of poverty distinctly exhilarating, like a bather’s first plunge into the sea. It was not hardship so far; it was merely adventure. He apologized to the disappointed cabman, and set off to walk to Chelsea, with that sense of superiority to fortune which Aristippus may have felt when he bade his tired slave throw away the bag of gold. Voluntary suffering has always exercised a powerful charm over a certain order of mankind. The starvation, the confinement, and the self-torture of the Hindu fakir and the Catholic saint have not been practised solely with a business-like view to reward in a future life; they have satisfied a need--morbid, perhaps, but real, since it is found among races that have scarcely risen to the conception of another world. It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing powers. As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation growing strong upon him. “After all, it would not be so bad to live this life,” he said to himself. “One might be very cosy in one of these small old houses, tucked up against some great dead wall, with unknown things taking place on the other side of it, or buried beneath some huge railway arch, with trains thundering overhead all night to unknown destinations. I seem to be an outlaw; why shouldn’t I live among outlaws? I could loaf about in flannel shirts and dressing-gowns all day long, and Molly would fetch me my beer from the public-house. I should smoke long clay pipes, and write an epic poem, like the ‘City of Dreadful Night.’” But the recollection of Thomson and his poem turned the current of his thoughts into a darker channel. “How many men of genius has London brained with her paving-stones!” he reflected bitterly. “The poet asks for nothing but liberty to sing, and the world will not give it to him. ‘Give me money’s worth for my bread and raiment and shelter’ is her harsh demand; and she drags the poet from his fountain in the wilderness to sweep the dust of the bazaar.”