glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper. When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door, but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run after him, and who said, “You didn’t pay for your supper.” Ray said, “Oh, I forgot it,” and he went back to his table and got his check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse apologies. Apparently they were too used to such tricks at that restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at every moment he got he reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a little of Sanderson’s cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters for the Midland _Echo_; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five dollars a week.