Across the river from where I now live stands the old, old house where the man of the wasted life was born. I did not know him as a boy, but the old people of the neighborhood spoke of him as the handsomest boy on the McElhattan side, and the place was noted for handsome people. He was a full grown man when I first saw him, while I was yet a boy. How handsome he was, standing six feet tall, with eyes and hair coal black and a face that showed the brain force seething behind the beautiful mask. His discontent was transparent to every reader of the human face. Even the droop of his dark mustache reminded one of the weeping willow branches hanging disconsolate over the tomb where sleeps the beloved dead. When I first met him I was only just awakening to the hopeless condition of my future life. Weak of body and with an untrained intellect, his broad education and power of deep meditation made him to tower above me like a mountain towering above a mouse; but he stooped to meet me half way, showing me the interior of his disappointed soul and receiving my sincere sympathy in exchange. At the hotel, where we many nights slept together in the same bed, the people complained of us talking all night long, to the annoyance of the other lodgers. And it was true. Many the night we lay in the dark and discussed everything on top of the earth, even going out of our sphere to discuss the orthodox dream of heaven. One night he spoke of the words that should some time decorate his tomb, and I still regret that I never mentioned his request to his relatives and family, and that now his marker does not display these solemn words: “I am what was, what is, and what is to be; and no living man shall ever roll away the stone that closes the door to the mystery into which I go. What is, is right or else the whole universe is wrong. I am not lost or wasted, for the economy of Nature hoards all the wealth of the world in a grasp that crushes life to get back her own.” What made this sublime thinker a bit of flotsam on the sea of Time? He told me once when in a confidential mood that the loss of the one woman he loved darkened his life and drove him to drink. The woman married another, and was still living when he told me his story, but he did not tell me who she was, nor whose fault it was that she became lost to him. How I pitied the big man, whose heart was as tender as that of a refined woman. What a power he could have been in the intellectual world if mated to the one woman he loved. When he lost her his grasp on ambition and enthusiasm weakened and he folded the desires of his soul into a shapeless mass and sat down upon them to brood over his loss.