ic, and even the citizens recognize
it. But, then, were each man dressed in different garb he could not be
disguised. Every one knows in what dull school that sidelong glance is
learned, that aimless drooping of the shoulders, that rhythmic lifting
of the heavy foot.

David Culross wondered if his will were dead. He put it to the test.
He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many
miserable years. He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at
nonchalance, and walked down the street with a step which was meant to
be brisk, but which was in fact only uncertain. In his pocket were ten
dollars. This much the State equips a man with when it sends him out of
its penal halls. It gives him also transportation to any point within
reasonable distance that he may desire to reach. Culross had requested a
ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days
it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been
laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait,
these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly
tossed in a wind-swept basin.

There was the office, bare and clean, where the young stoop-shouldered
clerks sat writing. In their faces was a strange resemblance, just as
there was in the backs of the ledgers, and in the endless bills on
the spindles. If one of them laughed, it was not with gayety, but with
gratification at the discomfiture of another. None of them ate well.
None of them were rested after sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy
one-horse cars to and from their work. Sundays they lay in bed very
late, and ate more dinner than they could digest. There was a certain
fellowship among them,--such fellowship as a band of captives among
cannibals might feel, each of them waiting with vital curiosity to
see who was the next to be eaten. But of that fellowship that plans
in unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicariously, strengthens into
friendship and communion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed, such
camaraderie would have been disapproved of by the Head Clerk. He would
have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he
would on an error in the footing of the year's accounts. It was tacitly
understood that one reached the proud position of Head Clerk by having
no emotions whatever.

Culross did not remember having been born with a pen in his hand, or
even with one behind his ear; but certainly