"It was in Johannesburg three years back, when I was down on me luck. I had been rooked properly by a Welsh gaming chap who was no end of a bounder, and three quid was all that stood between me and—well," he broke in, suddenly, "I had three quid left. I wore down me feet walking the streets of that bally town looking for anything that would keep me going for a while, and give me a chance to look around and fetch breath, and there was nothing, but I tell ye nothing, and I was fair desperate. One dye, and a filthy wet dye it was, too, I had gone out to the race track, beyond Hospital Hill, where the pony races are run, thinking as might be I’d find a berth, handling ponies there, but the season was too far gone, and they turned me awye. I came back to town by another road—then by the waye that fetches around by the Mahomedan burying-ground. Well, the pauper burying-ground used to be alongside in those dyes, and as I came up, jolly well blown, I tell ye, for I’d but tightened me belt by wye of breakfast, I saw a chap diggin’ a gryve. I was in a mind for gryves meself just then, so I pulled up and leaned over the fence and piped him off at his work. Then, like the geeser I’d come to be, I says: "’What are ye doing there, friend?’ He looked me over between shovelfuls a bit, and then says: "’Oh, just setting out early violets;’ and that shut me up properly. "Well, I piped him digging that gryve for perhaps five minutes, and then, s’ help me, I asked him for a job. I did—I asked that gryve-digger for a job—I was that low. He leans his back against the side of the gryve and looks me over, then by and bye, says he: "’All right, pardner!’ "’I’m thinking your from the Stytes,’ says I. "’Guess yes,’ he says, and goes on digging. "Well, we came to terms after a while. He was to give me two bob a dye for helping him at his work, and I was to have a bunk in his ’shack’, as he called it—a box of a house built of four boards, as I might sye, that stood just on the edge of the gryveyard. He was a rum ’un, was that Yankee chap. Over pipes that night he told me something of himself, and do y’ know, that gryve-digger in the pauper burying-ground in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a Harvard graduate! Strike me straight if I don’t believe he really was. The man was a wreck from strong drink, but that was the one thing he was proud of. "’Yes, sir,’ he’d say, over and over again, looking straight ahead of him, ’Yes, sir, I was a Harvard man once, and pulled at number five in the boat’—the ’varsity boat, mind ye; and then he’d go on talking half to himself. ’And now what am I? I’m digging gryves for hire—burying dead people for a living, when I ought to be dead meself. I am dead and buried long ago. Its just the whiskey that keeps me alive, Miller,’ he would say; ’when I stop that I’m done for.’