I tell you. Yet
good results came of it. For two or three months I lived on next to
nothing--a few pence a day, all told. Of course, if I had let Strangwyn
know how badly off I was, he'd have sent a cheque; but I didn't feel I
had any right to his money, it was yours, not mine. Besides, I said to
myself that, if I suffered, it was only what I deserved; I took it as a
sort of expiation of the harm I'd done. All that time I was in Dublin,
I tried to get employment but nobody had any use for me--until at last,
when I was all but dying of hunger, somebody spoke to me of a certain
Milligan, a young and very rich man living in Dublin. I resolved to go
and see him, and a lucky day it was. You remember Conolly--Bates's
traveller? Well, Milligan is just that man, in appearance; a thorough
Irishman, and one of the best hearted fellows that ever lived. Though
he's rich I found him living in a very plain way, in a room which
looked like a museum, full of fossils, stuffed birds and animals, queer
old pictures, no end of such things. Well, I told him plainly who I
was, and where I was; and almost without thinking, he cried out--'What
could be simpler? Come and be my secretary.'--'You want a
secretary?'--'I hadn't thought of it,' said Milligan, 'but now it
strikes me it's just what I _do_ want. I knew there was something. Yes,
yes, come and be my secretary; you're just the man.' He went on to tell
me he had a lot of correspondence with sellers of curiosities, and it
bored him to write the letters. Would I come for a couple of hours a
day? He'd pay me twenty pounds a month. You may suppose I wasn't long
in accepting. We began the next day, and in a week's time we were good
friends. Milligan told me that he'd always had weak health, and he was
convinced his life had been saved by vegetarianism. I myself wasn't
feeling at all fit just then; he persuaded me to drop meat, and taught
me all about the vegetarian way of living. I hadn't tried it for a
month before I found the most wonderful results. Never in my life had I
such a clear mind, and such good spirits. It remade me."

"So you've come to London to hunt for curios?" interposed Will.

"No, no; let me go on. When I got to know Milligan well, I found that
he had a large estate somewhere in Connaught. And, as we talked, an
idea came to me." Again he sprang up from his chair. "'If I were a
landowner on that scale,' I said, 'do you know what I should do--I
should make a vegetarian colony;