I took a long drive one day last Summer to see an old friend of mine who was in singularly hard luck; and I found him in even harder luck and more singular than I had expected. My drive took me to a spot a few miles back of a Southern sea-coast, where, in a cup-like hollow of the low, rocky hills, treeless save for stunted and distorted firs and pines, six or eight score of perspiring laborers, attired in low-necked costumes consisting exclusively of a pair of linen trousers a-piece, toil all day in the blazing sun to dig out some kind of clay of which I know nothing, except that it looks mean, smells worse, has a name ending in _ite_, and is of great value in the arts and sciences. They may make fertilizer out of it, or they may make water-colors: Billings told me, but I don’t know. There are some things that one forgets almost as readily as a blow to one’s pride. Moreover, this stuff was associated in my mind with Big Mitch. Of course Billings was making a fortune out of it. But as it would take six or eight years to touch the figure he had set for himself, and as he had no special guarantee of an immortal youth on this earth, and as, until the fortune was made, he had to live all the year around in that god-forsaken spot, and to live with Big Mitch, moreover, I looked upon him as a man in uncommonly hard luck. And he was. [Illustration] I had been visiting friends in a town some miles inland, and it had occurred to me that it would be an act of Christian charity to drive over the hills to Billings’s place of servitude, and to condole with my old friend. I had nothing else to do--a circumstance always favorable to the perpetration of acts of Christian charity--and I went. He was enthusiastically glad to see me--I was the first visitor he had ever had--and he left his office at once, and led me up the burning hot sand-hill to his house, which was a very comfortable sort of place when you got there. It was an old-fashioned Southern house, small but stately, with a Grecian portico in front, supported by two-story wooden pillars. Here he was established in lonely luxury, with no one to love, none to caress, swarms of darkeys, and a cellar full of wines that would have tempted the Dying Anchorite to swill. Casually dispatching half a dozen niggers after as many bottles of champagne as they thought we might need to whet our appetites for luncheon, Billings bade me welcome again, and we fell to friendly talk.