dentist hits us for about twenty-five
dollars every six months--that's fifty more. My wife spends about three
hundred and the children as much more. Of course that's fairly liberal.
One doesn't need ballgowns in our village.

"My own expenses are, railroad fare, lunches, tobacco--I smoke a pipe
mostly--and clothes--probably about five hundred in all. We go on a big
bat once a month and dine at a table-d'hote restaurant, and take in the
opera or the play. That costs some--about ten dollars a clip--say,
eighty for the season; and, of course, I blow the kids to a camping trip
every summer, which sets me back a good hundred and fifty. How does that
come out?"

I had jotted the items down, as he went along, on the back of an
envelope.

"Thirty-three hundred and eighty dollars," I said, adding them up.

"It seems a good deal," he commented, turning and gazing into the fire;
"but I have usually managed to lay up about fifteen hundred every
year--besides, of course, the little I give away."

I sat stunned. Thirty-three hundred dollars!--I spent seventy-two
thousand!--and the man lived as well as I did! What did I have that he
had not? But Hastings was saying something, still with his back toward
me.

"I suppose you thought I must be an ungrateful dog not to jump at the
offer you made me this morning," he remarked in an embarrassed manner.
"It's worried me a lot all day. I'm really tremendously gratified at
your kindness. I couldn't very well explain myself, and I don't know
what possessed me to say what I did about my not being willing to
exchange places with you. But, you see, I'm over forty. That makes a
heap of difference. I'm as good a stenographer as you can find, and so
long as my health holds out I can be sure of at least fifty dollars a
week, besides what I earn outside.

"I've never had any kink for the law. I don't think I'd be a success at
it; and frankly, saving your presence, I don't like it. A lot of it is
easy money and a lot of it is money earned in the meanest way there
is--playing dirty tricks; putting in the wrong a fellow that's really
right; aggravating misunderstandings and profiting by the quarrels
people get into. You're a high-class, honorable man, and you don't see
the things I see." I winced. If he only knew, I had seen a good deal!
"But I go round among the other law offices, and I tell you it's a
demoralizing profession.

"It's all right to reorganize a railroad; but in general litigation