s a
baker in Williamsburgh, and frequently addressed letters that were
written by X---- Senior and his wife to Dr. Louise X---- who was
then studying medicine in Philadelphia. X---- was then a boy going
to school, but working in his father's bakery mornings and
evenings. He did not want to do that, moaned a great deal, and his
parents humored him in his attitude. He was very vain, liked to
appear intellectual. They kept saying to their friends that he
should have a fine future. Five years later, after I had left them
once, I met the mother and she told me that X---- was studying
banking and getting along fine."

Some seven years after the failure and trial by which he had so
summarily been disposed of and after he had been released from prison, I
was standing at a certain unimportant street corner in New York waiting
for a car when I saw him. He was passing in the opposite direction, not
very briskly, and, as I saw, plainly meditatively. He was not so well
dressed. The clothes he wore while good were somehow different, lacking
in that exquisite something which had characterized him years before.
His hat--well, it was a hat, not a Romanoff shako nor a handsome panama
such as he had affected in the old days. He looked tired, a little worn
and dusty, I thought.

My first impulse was of course to hail him, my second not, since he had
not seen me. It might have been embarrassing, and at any rate he might
not have even remembered me. But as he walked I thought of the great
house by the sea, the studio, the cars, the 40,000 roses, the crowds at
his summer place, the receptions in town and out, Madame of the earrings
(afterward married to a French nobleman), and then of the letter to his
mother as a boy, the broken shoes in the winter time, his denial of his
parents, the telephone message from the financial tiger. "Vanity,
vanity," saith the preacher. The shores of our social seas are strewn
with pathetic wrecks, the whitening bone of half-sand-buried ships.

At the next corner he paused, a little uncertain apparently as to which
way to go, then turned to the left and was lost. I have never seen nor
heard of him since.

_The Mighty Rourke_

When I first met him he was laying the foundation for a small dynamo in
the engine-room of the repair shop at Spike, and he was most unusually
loud in his protestations and demands. He had with him a dozen Italians,
all short, swarthy fel