as over his desk. This, they reasoned, was but a
slight service to perform for the most enchanting beggar in the world.

"Dear fellow," said Rick Dodson, who loved him, "is it the Devil you
expect to see? And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is not
such a bad old chap."

"You haven't found him so?"

"Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of the
world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what
there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few
bad habits--such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours
madness?--which would be quite to your credit,--for gadzooks, I like a
lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much
data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more
occult, and therefore more interesting?"

"Rick, boy," said Tim, "you're too--inquiring!" And he turned to his
desk with a look of delicate hauteur.

It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent
together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who,
having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now
journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. The
dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the
cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of
sociable silence.

"Rick," he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?"

"And so has my nose!"

"You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my
confession to you. What I fear is Fear."

"That's because you've drunk too much--or not enough.

"'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling--'"

"My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But
it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts."

"For an agnostic that seems a bit--"

"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that
I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts--no--no things
which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done--"

"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and
jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'"

Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and there
was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn
showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed away
the moist hair from hi