I had for a time reveled in the dreams which fleetingly haunt all mortals, that there I had found the lost Arcadia, where balmy zephyrs fan the brow into ecstasy forever; but, alas! After a brief respite I had, in that land which the real estate sharks called "Paradise," suffered more from alternating chilling winds and withering heat than ever before; one day sweltering in the thinnest of seersuckers, and perhaps the very next shivering in all the woolens I could command. Without a shadow of regret or even a backward look, I bade farewell to the Pacific and returned to the Atlantic of my youth, until the day dawns and the shadows flee away. I sojourned for some months in the cities of Richmond, Baltimore, Providence, and Philadelphia, endeavoring to impress upon the minds of the physicians the importance of prescribing my remedy, but with no glittering financial success, lingering for weeks in the last named city, on the very verge of the grave to which I was brought by the filthy water of that grotesquely misnamed "City of Brotherly Love." I had been, in former years, the champion school-book agent of New England, and publishers had often told me that if I ever returned to this vocation, they would gladly employ me. I applied to one of these for a position, requesting a man who owed his success in business entirely to my friendly aid and instructions, to speak a good word for me, but he at once showed his gratitude by securing the appointment for himself, being aided and abetted by an influential bald-headed man who hated me, simply because I had sent to him a friend who represented a hair restorer. Said bald-headed man had many reasons to, and had often claimed to be, a friend of mine; but was foolishly sensitive about his lack of hirsute adornment, and said I insulted him by referring to his billiard-ball caput. Truly, gratitude is a lost art, and some friends immediately become enemies when they can secure from you no more plunder. It is exceedingly difficult for a man who has passed the "death line" of the half century, to find a place where he can do good and get good; the hustling crowd of younger and stronger competitors push him to the wall or trample him beneath their feet, in the terrific scramble for the bare necessities of life. He drifts into the depressing occupation of book or life insurance agency, and at once every so-called friend, who pretended to worship him when he was prosperous, gives him the cold shoulder, and "poor devil" is the most complimentary epithet with which he is greeted.