forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of
people he had known--the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare
of the _Cafe de Couronne_--all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.

Meeus was one of the "unfortunate men." He had held a small clerkship
under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a
fault of his own.

This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and
sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has
nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of
official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A
sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his
dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the
world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch,
which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled
down to live on a maiden aunt.

He called it looking for work.

She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity
died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped
to support him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in
those days that seemed so far distant from him now.

Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and
with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the
_declasse_, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a
living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows
who sat in the _cafes_ and walked the boulevards and ogled the women.

He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last
in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his assistance with two
hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable,
but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer
whose momentary support has gone to pieces.

Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an
acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but
the Congo Government.

Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and
still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the
infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from
niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten
orange-peel picked up in the