I had done the same thing in my earlier
life, only it needed a far greater courage to face that life now than
it required then. Things were at their very worst when one day, as I
was wending my way through the poverty-stricken locality in which I
lived, I was hailed by my name. The man was shabbily dressed, but
about my own age as far as I could gather, yet I never remembered
having met him before.

"'You don't remember me?' he asked.

"'No,' I replied.

"'Humph!' he rejoined, 'and yet at school you had quite a slap-up fight
upon my behalf, which ought to have been a lesson to snobs in general,
simply because I insisted upon talking to my own father when he was
driving one of his own furniture vans.'

"'Murkel Minor,' I murmured. 'Jove, yes, I remember.'

"'Well, I'm a dealer now, got a place of my own, first-class antiques,
you know, doing rather well, too.'

"I nodded.

"'But, I say, how about yourself? you don't look up to much. What are
you doing? You know all the swell chaps at school, who always looked
down on me, used to think you would do no end of things.'

"Somehow or other a sudden feeling of utter frankness came over me. 'I
am not doing anything,' I said. 'I've never done anything, and I don't
believe now I ever shall do anything.'

"'What are you supposed to do?' asked Murkel, and he asked it in rather
a nice way.

"'Writing,' I said.

"'Books?'

"'Yes, and stories, and any blessed thing that comes along; that is to
say, when it _does_ come along.'

"Murkel mused for awhile as we walked along, and to this day I do not
know whether he considered he was paying off an old debt, or whether he
really required my services. Anyway he told me he wanted a descriptive
catalogue written of some of his best antiques, their history
guaranteed and authenticated, and that he would pay me a fair sum for
writing it.

"I left my one-time schoolfellow Murkel Minor, with the certainty of
work for which I should be paid, and with something like a ray of hope,
and oddly enough I did not lament over the strange fortune which had
prevented any one from accepting any of my books or poems, but had
given me instead the writing of a catalogue of bric-a-brac. There was
one thing I often resented in my own mind, and frequently sneered at
most bitterly whenever I remembered it; that was the fact that Lal had
prophesied that I should become great, and also that I should meet Dick
Whittington. Both these imagi