s the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the
scarab-seller and he of the brass tray cursed me heartily as they
struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How
meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual
happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the
Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the
intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny,
deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and
left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo
traffic, while I--the real I--lived far away. Truly the poets and the
children are our only realists, and Time and Space have fooled the
rest of us unmercifully.

I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in
the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were,
indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a
Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for
Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North
Carolina down on my shoulders, somehow--and that without the faintest
interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon
me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was
there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother,
beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phaeton, was
merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have
handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the
means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of
benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way
for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and
run away--a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I
do not know how to receive thanks--they embarrass me frightfully. To
stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan
weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to
achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity--it was something to
keep the ridiculous creature busy--her yacht, her picture gallery, her
stud-farm, if you will.

As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two
pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them
weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a
little wine for my a