I tell you the whole thing is a question of money with me. I have come down to the bare bed-rock of sordidness--I must have money--_money!_--It is everything in this world to me. I can never think of anything else again until I have it. * * * * * I see myself going out into the world and fighting as other men fight, and making a place in it for myself. * * * * * May 8th. I am getting down again; my poor hoard is going! I sit and count it--I calculate it--I lay out my bill of fare. Oh, where shall I go, what _can_ I do? Can I write anything? I ask. I have nothing in me but a naked, shivering longing. I dread to be in the desperate fix I was the last time I could find no work. And yet I can not make up my mind to do anything until I hear from this one publisher more. * * * * * May 9th. I walked over there to-day to save a postage-stamp. They had not heard from the reader yet. * * * * * --I sit down and try to study. Then I get up and say I ought not to put it off any longer. Then again I think: “Wait until to-morrow, at any rate.” * * * * * May 10th. I was looking at that man's magazine to-day. What thoughts it brought to me--what agonies, what longings, what despair! And, above all, what ocean-floods of bitterness! * * * * * I walked all the way down to the wholesale-paper store. I thought I would prefer that to evils that I know not of. I have almost a terror of having to come into contact with new people. But my place was filled. I trudged home again. I went to the publisher's too; nothing yet. The three weeks were up to-day. * * * * * May 12th. I dared not wait any more to-day. I had just three dollars and ten cents left. And my rent is due the day after to-morrow. I have answered every sort of advertisement, from dishwashing to tutoring a boy. I guess I looked too seedy for the latter. * * * * * --Sometimes when I am wandering around in all this misery, still yearning for what I might have been, the thought comes across my mind: “And in this huge world there might yet be some one who would understand the thing! Some one who would help me! Some one by whom it would be an honor to be helped--if I could only find him.” And here I am, having my life beaten out of me, spark by spark,--and I can't find him--I _can't_! * * * * * I cry out for money--for money! * * * * * But no, it is others who have it.--And the way that they use it--O God, the way that they use it! If all the world were poor, it would not be so bad; but the sight of wealth--of infinite oceans of it squandered in perfect frenzies of ostentation! The sight of this “world”--this world, which they take quite as a matter of course!