he can't beg. You have taken me in and fed me.
You have said the first kind words I have heard, it seems to me, in
years. I don't know who you are. I shall never see you again."

I cannot well describe the intensity of the passion with which he spoke,
his face shaking with emotion, his hands trembling.

"Oh, yes," I said easily, "we are comfortable people here--and it is a
good place to live."

"No no," he returned. "I know, I've got my call--" Then leaning forward
he said in a lower, even more intense voice--"I live everything
beforehand."

I was startled by the look of his eyes: the abject terror of it: and I
thought to myself, "The man is not right in his mind." And yet I longed
to know of the life within this strange husk of manhood.

"I know," he said, as if reading my thought, "you think"--and he tapped
his forehead with one finger--"but I'm not. I'm as sane as you are."

It was a strange story he told. It seems almost unbelievable to me as I
set it down here, until I reflect how little any one of us knows of the
deep life within his nearest neighbour--what stories there are, what
tragedies enacted under a calm exterior! What a drama there _may_ be in
this commonplace man buying ten pounds of sugar at the grocery store, or
this other one driving his two old horses in the town road! We do not
know. And how rarely are the men of inner adventure articulate!
Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me. I do not
question its truth. It came as all truth does, through a clouded and
unclean medium: and any judgment of the story itself must be based upon
a knowledge of the personal equation of the Ruin who told it.

"I am no tramp," he said, "in reality, I am no tramp. I began as well as
anyone--It doesn't matter now, only I won't have any of the sympathy
that people give to the man who has seen better days. I hate sentiment.
_I hate it_----"

I cannot attempt to set down the story in his own words. It was broken
with exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes
of self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of
introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of
the narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so little
that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal,
some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form.
"I am afraid before life," he said. "It makes me dizzy with thought."

At anoth