"Yes?" I said and halted. "It's rather beastly, but I need a drink and I haven't a penny--not a sou." I said "Diable," and put my hand into my pocket. The man's clothes, accent and bearing presumed so much that if he needed a drink he needed food. At once Flynt intervened. What was said I do not know; the two stepped aside; but presently there was laughter from both Flynt and my beggar; and we three sat at table later, and told tales, and flushed one another's secrets. My beggar was a gentleman ranker out on a spree (it is Kipling of course), damned to all eternity, but his guard once broken he was amusing, and Flynt knew the trick to break his guard. "Why, after I was dropped from the service, and it came to selling my wife's jewels, I had rather beg than that, and I cannot get work," he said simply. "They say my clothes are too good. What the deuce is the matter with my clothes? But begging is not so bad; I make a good thing of it." At the moment the point I wish to make is that Flynt knew his vagrant in the open. He had a profound contempt for the books written by frock-coated gentlemen who have academic positions, and say "sociology," and measure the skulls and take the confessions of the vagrant in captivity. Skull for skull he believed there was small difference between that of the first scamp and the first minister of the Gospel. I set that down for what it is worth as his opinion. The confessions of a vagrant in captivity are always, he said, false. This I fancy is almost true. I had chose a passably dreary seminary course in Harvard in which all the literature of criminology had been got up and reported. I myself had looked into some of the books--too many--some is too many. Five minutes of Flynt's talk turned my books into a heap of rubbish. Five hours' stroll with him made me forget that the rubbish heap existed. At his best, and it was at his best that I knew him, he was what he wished to be--the foremost authority among those who knew him in the side streets. He had paid for his knowledge--paid with his person. "Old Boston Mary" I believe to be in part fiction; I could never surprise the little man into a confession; but he has lain on the trucks of a Pullman and in the blinding cinders and dust seen his companion lose grip from sheer weariness, and go--to meet Boston Mary. He had tightened his own grip, and been sorry. He could do no more. JOSIAH FLYNT--AN IMPRESSION BY EMILY M. BURBANK