was to receive from
the Examiner to the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least
The Youth's Companion could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the
perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused him. Nor did he mind,
in the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he ruined
his suit of clothes. He caught the tailor by telephone that night from
Mr. Higginbotham's store and ordered another suit. Then he carried the
wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-escape to the rear
wall of the building, and when he had moved his bed out from the wall,
found there was just space enough in the small room for himself and the
wheel.

Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school
examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent
the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance that
burned in him. The fact that the Examiner of that morning had failed to
publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his spirits. He was at
too great a height for that, and having been deaf to a twice-repeated
summons, he went without the heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr.
Higginbotham invariably graced his table. To Mr. Higginbotham such a
dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and prosperity, and
he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American
institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any
hard-working man to rise--the rise, in his case, which he pointed out
unfailingly, being from a grocer's clerk to the ownership of
Higginbotham's Cash Store.

Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished "Pearl-diving" on Monday
morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school. And when,
days later, he applied for the results of his examinations, he learned
that he had failed in everything save grammar.

"Your grammar is excellent," Professor Hilton informed him, staring at
him through heavy spectacles; "but you know nothing, positively nothing,
in the other branches, and your United States history is abominable--there
is no other word for it, abominable. I should advise you--"

Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and
unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes. He was professor of physics
in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a
select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.

"Yes, sir," Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at th