am and electricity, grows very sizable again when a
man comes back to the elemental means of progress--his own two legs. As
for the smaller world in which he had been living--the world of luxury
and of worshiping disciples--he laughed silently to think what a mirage
it was and always had been.

Down the Mississippi he crept, sometimes peering from between the great
trees that flanked its steep banks, as the red Indians did long ago, to
see the boats of the white man go serenely up and down that mighty
swirling current, and stopping even in his self-absorption to feel a
little of the beauty when the great river spread itself into the
shimmering expanse of Lake Pipin, or to remember, at Winona, the
picturesque legend that he had heard of the deserted Chippewa maiden who
here threw herself from the overhanging rocks into the pitiless rush of
waters below, and left only her ghost and her sweet-sounding name to the
spot. He halted to inspect the great monolith, a hundred feet in height,
of Sugar Loaf.

He had an idea that in some little town to the south he might venture to
board a straggling cross-country train to Chicago; and, once in the
thick of men again, he believed himself safe. He had always been wary
enough to keep on his person a certain sum of money. Such as it was, it
might serve his purpose. It also tickled his sense of humor to think
that--shabby black wayfarer that he was--he had in his pocket a check
for five thousand dollars, that he could not cash, and a handful of
rubies that were enough to awaken the suspicions of the least
suspicious. But still, day after day and night after night, he plodded
patiently on his way down the water course, until at last, at Prairie du
Chien, two hundred miles from St. Etienne, he felt that he might comfort
his inner man with hot food, and his weary legs with a bed and a
pillow. He prowled along the streets of the country town looking for
some cheap lodging-house where such as he, a humble, cringing, dog-like
fellow, might find shelter. He looked through a dusty window and saw a
shaggy-bearded, roughly-dressed man shoveling food with a knife, and he
felt that he had found the right place.

The proprietor of the establishment sat at a small table absorbed in the
perusal of a week-old Sunday newspaper. He growled out a "Guess so.
Sausages; baked beans; coffee," to Ram Juna's polite inquiry. It neither
looked nor smelled inviting, but the Hindu submitted to fate and
swallowed