But when I returned to the West, after thirty years' absence, this last spring, one of my chief aims was to find some traces of them. I took passage for W----, therefore, the largest town in their old county, finding that a railroad had invaded that region,--passing, by the way, through the very spot where we opened the mound. Business detained me in W---- for several days, and at the close of the week, one close, sultry evening, I was strolling about the dingy streets with the lonesome feeling which always besets one in a strange place, when I came to a little foot-bridge over the creek, from which opened a view of the river below, and the foundries glaring red on either side. It was a lonely place, though in the midst of a busy town. I stopped, leaning over the little hand-rail, looking down into the muddy water, and at the silent, melancholy lights burning dully in its depths and in the air above. There was a solitary figure on the bridge, which strangely entered into the quiet and dreariness of the scene, depressing it, giving to its dingy and unclean shadows a human significance of loss and discomfort. It was an old man, in a filthy suit of black, who stood smoking a coarse cigar and looking vacantly down into the creek. His head was bald, a fringe of uncombed red hair straggling about the pinched and pimpled face; it shook weakly when he tried to look at me; the light eyes blinked blindly in the dim light. A weak, tipsy bit of old human flesh, which once might have made a man; yet you fancied he had become a drunkard as a cowardly escape from pain,--that he had been disappointed before he had begun life. Nearly an hour I stood quietly watching him,--then, having known him for some time, I touched his arm. "Abel," I said,--"Abel Steadman?" He started, reddened in his old womanish fashion, and, when he recognized me at last, stood cringing, holding his frowzy hat in both hands with a subservient humility pitiful to see. His manhood had slipped from him so utterly, that his harmless vanity had left but the dregs of self-disgust. "Come, man," I said, "be cheery at seeing an old friend. Give an account of yourself." I forced him with me to the hotel, and ordered wine, seeing that he needed a stimulant. He had come unwillingly, almost angrily, and now sat on the edge of a chair, his hat held in both hands between his knees. "That's no good,"--pushing the wine feebly away. "I only take it when I cannot breathe without." After a long time, however, the poor creature seemed to waken into a faint likeness of his old self, and told me his story in a forlorn, disjointed way. After I heard it, I thought, cruelly enough, that he had had sufficient of his poor portion of life, and all that remained for him was to die as weakly as he had lived. I tried to rouse him by asking for his poems and essays. "No good came of any of them yet. When I get my rights, I'll publish. It won't be long to wait now." "You mean"----