llars. Behold me
saved!'

He sipped his coffee again.

'I have never come across an English editor who treated me with anything
like that consideration and general kindliness. How the man had time, in
his position, to see me so often, and do things in such a human way,
I can't understand. Imagine anyone trying the same at the office of a
London newspaper! To begin with, one couldn't see the editor at all. I
shall always think with profound gratitude of that man with the peaked
brown beard and pleasant smile.'

'But did the pea-nuts come after that!' inquired Dora.

'Alas! they did. For some months I supported myself in Chicago, writing
for that same paper, and for others. But at length the flow of my
inspiration was checked; I had written myself out. And I began to grow
home-sick, wanted to get back to England. The result was that I found
myself one day in New York again, but without money enough to pay for a
passage home. I tried to write one more story. But it happened, as I was
looking over newspapers in a reading-room, that I saw one of my Chicago
tales copied into a paper published at Troy. Now Troy was not very far
off; and it occurred to me that, if I went there, the editor of this
paper might be disposed to employ me, seeing he had a taste for my
fiction. And I went, up the Hudson by steamboat. On landing at Troy I
was as badly off as when I reached Chicago; I had less than a dollar.
And the worst of it was I had come on a vain errand; the editor treated
me with scant courtesy, and no work was to be got. I took a little room,
paying for it day by day, and in the meantime I fed on those loathsome
pea-nuts, buying a handful in the street now and then. And I assure you
I looked starvation in the face.'

'What sort of a town is Troy?' asked Marian, speaking for the first
time.

'Don't ask me. They make straw hats there principally, and they sell
pea-nuts. More I remember not.'

'But you didn't starve to death,' said Maud.

'No, I just didn't. I went one afternoon into a lawyer's office,
thinking I might get some copying work, and there I found an odd-looking
old man, sitting with an open Bible on his knees. He explained to me
that he wasn't the lawyer; that the lawyer was away on business,
and that he was just guarding the office. Well, could he help me?
He meditated, and a thought occurred to him. "Go," he said, "to
such-and-such a boarding-house, and ask for Mr Freeman Sterling. He is
just starting on a