What that grievance was, and what was their story, a whole generation had tried vainly to find out. Every young reporter tried his hand at it at least once, some many times, I among them. None of us ever found out anything tangible about them. Now and then we ran down a rumor in the region of Bleecker street, then the "French quarter,"--I should have said that they were French and spoke but a few words of broken English when they spoke at all,--only to have it come to nothing. One which I recall was to the effect that, at some time in the far past, the elder of the two had been a schoolmaster in Lorraine, and had come across the sea in quest of a fabulous fortune left by his brother, one of the gold-diggers of '49, who died in his boots; that there had been some disagreement between father and son, which resulted in the latter running away with their saved-up capital, leaving the old man stranded in a strange city, among people of strange speech, without the means of asserting his claim, and that, when he realized this, he lost his reason. Thus his son, Erneste, found him, returning after years penniless and repentant. From that meeting father and son came forth what they were ever since. So ran the story, but whether it was all fancy, or some or most of it, I could not tell. No one could. One by one, the reporters dropped them, unable to make them out. The officers of a French benevolent society, where twice a week they received fixed rations, gave up importuning them to accept the shelter of the house before their persistent, almost fierce, refusal. The police did not trouble them, except when people complained that the tin signs tore their clothes. After that they walked with canvas posters, and were let alone. One morning in the winter of 1882, among the police reports of the night's happenings that were laid upon my desk, I found one saying that Virgile Dubourque, Frenchman, seventy-five years old, had died in a Wooster-street lodging-house. The story of his death, as I learned it there that day, was as tragic as that of his life. He had grown more and more feeble, until at last he was unable to leave the house. For the first time the son went out alone. The old man sat by the stove all day, silently brooding over his wrongs. The lodgers came and went. He heeded neither their going nor their coming. Through the long night he kept his seat, gazing fixedly into the fire. In the morning, when daylight shone upon the cold, gray ashes, he sat there dead. The son slept peacefully beside him.