o, before he had grown too old and tired
to love. Also, she had married and gone away, and his mind had gone to
sleep. Yet it had been a wonderful experience, and he used often to
look back upon it as other men and women look back upon the time they
believed in fairies. He had never believed in fairies nor Santa Claus;
but he had believed implicitly in the smiling future his imagination had
wrought into the steaming cloth stream.

He had become a man very early in life. At seven, when he drew his first
wages, began his adolescence. A certain feeling of independence crept
up in him, and the relationship between him and his mother changed.
Somehow, as an earner and breadwinner, doing his own work in the world,
he was more like an equal with her. Manhood, full-blown manhood, had
come when he was eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night
shift for six months. No child works on the night shift and remains a
child.

There had been several great events in his life. One of these had been
when his mother bought some California prunes. Two others had been the
two times when she cooked custard. Those had been events. He remembered
them kindly. And at that time his mother had told him of a blissful dish
she would sometime make--"floating island," she had called it, "better
than custard." For years he had looked forward to the day when he would
sit down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he
had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.

Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk. That, also, was
a great event in his life, withal a tragic one. He knew his duty on the
instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even he had picked it up.
At home, as usual, there was not enough to eat, and home he should have
taken it as he did his wages every Saturday night. Right conduct in this
case was obvious; but he never had any spending of his money, and he was
suffering from candy hunger. He was ravenous for the sweets that only on
red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.

He did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew it was sin, and
deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy debauch.
Ten cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being accustomed to the
carrying of money, he lost the ten cents. This occurred at the time when
he was suffering all the torments of conscience, and it was to him an
act of divine retribution. He had a frightened sense o