d not
increase his income. He sought manual labor which could be done at
night, but failed even in this, for at that time he lacked utterly the
way about him which fits the city, and persuades the man of business
when there is little labor to be done. It was almost a time of panic.
He would wander about the streets at night like a lost spirit.
Sometimes he would meet old college friends. He had classmates in the
city, some of them well-to-do and well established, and they were glad
to meet him, the man who had done a little to give the class its
record, and he was invited to swell dinners and to parties. He would
but feign excuses, and to none of them told bluntly, as he should have
done, just what his situation was, and how a trifling aid would make
his future different. He was very proud, this arrogant product of the
old Briton blending and the new world's new northwest, and he lacked
the sense which comes with experience in the bearings of a life all
novel, and so he remained silent, and, incidentally, hungry.

It was at this period of his career that Harlson was in closest
sympathy with the sad-eyed Hindoo king. He was not doing anything out
of the way; he was working hard, with clean ambitions, yet he was
hungry. He could not understand it. No doubt an empty stomach
inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws. There comes
with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason,
and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but which is recklessly
acute.

"I want to do things, I want to help others--I don't know why, but I
do--I have ambitions, but I try to make them good. I am doing the best
I can with the brains I have. I get up in the morning from the office
floor and do my utmost all day, and try to do better when I get out,
but nothing helps me! Where is the God who, it is said, at worst,
helps those who help themselves.

"'You say that we have a meaning;
So has dung, and its meaning is flowers.'

"The Hindoo king must be right. I am, we all are but like horses, or
trees, or mushrooms; and it is only some sort of accident which makes
each thing with life successful or unsuccessful, happy or unhappy, as
the case may be."

So, at this time, Grant Harlson reasoned, blindly, yet in his heart
there was something which protested against his own deductions and kept
him in the path which was straightforward, and from staking all the
future on the morrow. So drifted aw