Happy is the man who is without encumbrances--that that is if he knows how to be happy. Whenever Paul Clitheroe found the burden of the day becoming oppressive he cast it off, and sought solace in a change of scene. He could always, or almost always, do this at a moment's notice. It chanced, upon a certain occasion, when a little community of artists were celebrating the sale of a great picture--the masterpiece of one of their number--that word was sent to Paul to join their feast. He found the large studio where several of them worked intermittently, highly decorated; a table was spread in a manner to have awakened an appetite even upon the palate of the surfeited; there were music and dancing, and bacchanalian revels that went on and on from night to day and on to night again. It was a veritable feast of lanterns, and not until the last one had burned to the socket and the wine-vats were empty and the studio strewn with unrecognizable debris and permeated with odors stale, flat and unprofitable, did the revels cease. Paul came to dine; he remained three days; he had not yet worn out his welcome, but he had resolved, as was his wont at intervals, to withdraw from the world, and so he returned to the Eyrie,--which was ever his initial step toward the accomplishment of the longed-for end. Not very many days later Paul received the breeziest of letters; it was one of a series of racy rhapsodies that came to him bearing the Santa Rosa postmark. They were such letters as a fellow might write to a college chum, but with no line that could have brought a blush to the cheek of modesty--not that the college chum is necessarily given to the inditing of such epistles. These letters were signed "Jack."