Being new to New York and rather hard-pressed myself, I was throughout this scene studying this amazing figure and wondering how any corporation could be so parsimonious as to dress a starveling employee in so shabby a way, and from what wretched circumstances such a youth, who would endure such treatment and such work, must spring. Suddenly, seeing me looking at him and wondering, and just as the recipient of the message was handing him back his book signed, his face became painfully and, as it seemed to me, involuntarily contorted with such a grimace of misery and inward spiritual dissatisfaction as I had not seen anywhere before. It was a miserable and moving grimace, followed by a struggle not to show what he felt. But suddenly he turned and drawing a big red cold wrist and hand across his face and eyes and starting for the door, he blurted out: “I never did have no home, God damn it! I never did have no father or mother, like you people, nor no chance either. I was raised in an orphan asylum--” and he was gone. “Sometimes,” observed the youth who had started this line of jesting, getting up and looking apologetically at the rest of us, “this dam’ persiflage can be sprung in the wrong place and at the wrong time. I apologize. I’m ashamed of myself, and sorry too.” [Illustration: A Character] “I’m sorry too,” said another, a gentlemanly Southerner, whom later I came to know better and to like. But that boy! * * * * * For years, when I was a youth and was reading daily at the old Astor Library, there used to appear on the streets of New York an old man, the spindling counterpart, so far as height, weight and form were concerned, of William Cullen Bryant, who for shabbiness of attire, sameness of appearance, persistence of industry and yet futility in so far as any worth while work was concerned could hardly have been outclassed. A lodger at the Mills Hotel, in Bleecker Street, that hopeless wayplace of the unfortunate, he was also a frequenter of the Astor Library, where, as I came to know through watching him over months and years even, he would burrow by the hour among musty volumes from which he made copious notes jotted on paper with a pencil, both borrowed from the library authorities. Year after year for a period of ten years I encountered him from time to time wearing the same short, gray wool coat, the same thin black baggy trousers, the same cheap brownish-black Fedora hat, and the same long uncut hair and beard, the former curly and hanging about his shoulders. His body, even in the bitterest weather, never supported an overcoat. His hands were always bare and the wrists more or less exposed. He came invariably with a quick, energetic step toward the library or the Mills Hotel and turned a clear, blue, birdlike eye upon whomsoever surveyed him. But of ability--nothing, in so far as any one ever knew. The library authorities knew nothing of anything he had ever achieved. Those who