ity
might be worked up.

These meditations accompanied him in his multifarious wanderings through
the streets and the suburbs of the New England capital. As I have also
mentioned, he was absent for hours--long periods during which Mrs.
Tarrant, sustaining nature with a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut,
wondered how in the world he stayed his stomach. He never wanted
anything but a piece of pie when he came in; the only thing about which
he was particular was that it should be served up hot. She had a private
conviction that he partook, at the houses of his lady patients, of
little lunches; she applied this term to any episodical repast, at any
hour of the twenty-four. It is but fair to add that once, when she
betrayed her suspicion, Selah remarked that the only refreshment _he_
ever wanted was the sense that he was doing some good. This effort with
him had many forms; it involved, among other things, a perpetual
perambulation of the streets, a haunting of horse-cars,
railway-stations, shops that were "selling off." But the places that
knew him best were the offices of the newspapers and the vestibules of
the hotels--the big marble-paved chambers of informal reunion which
offer to the streets, through high glass plates, the sight of the
American citizen suspended by his heels. Here, amid the piled-up
luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers, the
disconsolate "guests," the truculent Irish porters, the rows of
shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters at a table inlaid
with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made innumerable contemplative
stations. He could not have told you, at any particular moment, what he
was doing; he only had a general sense that such places were national
nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more one was "on the
spot." The _penetralia_ of the daily press were, however, still more
fascinating, and the fact that they were less accessible, that here he
found barriers in his path, only added to the zest of forcing an
entrance. He abounded in pretexts; he even sometimes brought
contributions; he was persistent and penetrating, he was known as the
irrepressible Tarrant. He hung about, sat too long, took up the time of
busy people, edged into the printing-rooms when he had been eliminated
from the office, talked with the compositors till they set up his
remarks by mistake, and to the newsboys when the compositors had turned
their backs. He was always trying to find out what