My earnings were small--just sufficient to afford me a hall room in a boarding house, where, with my few books, I maintained my interest in life. I began it as a sailor in deep-water ships, but, because of the small promise of advancement, quit the sea after ten years, and worked on shore. I was ambitious, studious, and fairly well educated. I worked at one thing and another, finally becoming a reader for a magazine; and, later, editor-in-chief. But the strain upon my mind of reading, classifying, and rejecting or accepting for publication the various and multitudinous manuscripts sent to me, wore down my mental powers until there came an utter collapse, and I spent the next few years in sanitariums, with all memory of my past blotted out, except a few salient points, such as the name of my first ship, my first job on shore, my first incursion into literary work, and the final furious quarrel with my employer, when I was discharged as incompetent. Then came my slow recovery to the point where I could obtain and hold my position as collector. So much, in prelude, for myself and history. Yet there is one more point of my early life that I remembered, but only because my memory of it was refreshed occasionally as I fought my way along in my shore life after leaving the sea--Jack Sullivan, a watchmate on that first ship, who later became a boarding-house runner and afterward a successful boarding and shipping master. Jack's path in life did not coincide with mine, yet we met often during my struggle for advancement, and each time it was a drink together, and a reminiscent talk about that voyage; and it continued during the years when I was an incompetent neurasthenic, and he a prosperous man with influence at Tammany Hall. It was after such a meeting with Jack, in which he had paid the bill and clapped me on the back, bidding me to brace up and look ahead, that I wandered into a small playhouse, the bills of which advertised a mesmeric exhibition. I had never seen such a public performance before, and was extremely interested, as the operator, a tall, bearded man, in evening clothes, called up members of the audience and, after a few passes over their heads and down before them, put them into hypnotic or mesmeric sleep; and then made them perform absurd and ridiculous feats. I left the theatre, fully impressed, struck with awe at the power of one man over others, and boarded a street car on my way home. Still wondering, and afflicted with an uneasy struggle of my mind with the idea that I had known of such things before, I was forced to listen to a desultory conversation between two men who sat near me. They were well-dressed and well-spoken--educated men--and as the talk went on I easily deduced that they were physicians, slightly acquainted--one, a visiting physician of a hospital; the other, a general practitioner.