a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory. They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame is all ours. I am miserable during my interviews with the journalist whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the "'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits of the business man,--I am glad I can speak of them in the past,--though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful schemes.