Josiah Flynt was never quite at home under a roof or in the company of ordinary people, where he seemed always like one caught and detained unwillingly. An American, who had studied in a German university, brought up, during his early life, in Berlin, he always had a fixed distaste for the interests of those about him, and an instinctive passion for whatever exists outside the border-line which shuts us in upon respectability. There is a good deal of affectation in the literary revolt against respectability, together with a child's desire to shock its elders, and snatch a lurid reputation from those whom it professes to despise. My friend never had any of this affectation; life was not a masquerade to him, and his disguises were the most serious part of his life. The simple fact is, that respectability, the normal existence of normal people, did not interest him; he could not even tell you why, without searching consciously for reasons; he was born with the soul of a vagabond, into a family of gentle, exquisitely refined people: he was born so, that is all. Human curiosity, which in most of us is subordinate to some more definite purpose, existed in him for its own sake; it was his inner life, he had no other; his form of self-development, his form of culture. It seems to me that this man, who had seen so much of humanity, who had seen humanity so closely, where it has least temptation to be anything but itself, really achieved culture, almost perfect of its kind, though the kind were of his own invention. He was not an artist, who can create; he was not a thinker or a dreamer, or a man of action; he was a student of men and women, and of the outcasts among men and women, just those people who are least accessible, least cared for, least understood, and therefore, to one like my friend, most alluring. He was not conscious of it, but I think there was a great pity at the heart of this devouring curiosity. It was his love of the outcast which made him like to live with outcasts, not as a visitor in their midst, but as one of themselves. For here is the difference between this man and the other adventurers who have gone about among tramps, and criminals, and other misunderstood or unfortunate people. Some have been philanthropists, and have gone with the Bible in their hands; others have been journalists, and have gone with note-books in their hands; all have gone as visitors, plunging into "the bath of multitude," as one might go holiday making to the seaside and plunge into the sea. But this man, wherever he has gone, has gone with a complete abandonment to his surroundings; no tramp has ever known that "Cigarette" was not really a tramp; he has begged, worked, ridden outside trains, slept in workhouses and gaols, not shirked one of the hardships of his way; and all the time he has been living his own life (whatever that enigma may be!) more perfectly, I am sure, than when he was dining every day at his mother's or his sister's table.