t the curb, looking dazedly after
him. Before he reached Fifty-ninth Street he was half-sitting,
half-reclining in the corner of the seat, his eyes closed and his
senses sinking into a stupor from the fumes of the powerful doses of
brandy. As the hansom drove down the avenue many recognized him,
wondered and pitied as they noted his color, his collapsed body, head
fallen on one side, mouth open and lips greenish gray. As the hansom
slowly crossed the tracks at Twenty-third Street the heavy jolt roused
him.

"The newspapers," he muttered, and hurled up through the trap in the
roof an order to the driver to stop. He leaned over the doors and
bought half a dozen newspapers of the woman at the Flat-iron stand. As
the hansom moved on he glanced at the head-lines--they were big and
staring, but his blurred eyes could not read them. He fell asleep
again, his hands clasped loosely about the huge proclamations of
yesterday's battle and his rout.

The hansom was caught in a jam at Chambers Street. The clamor of
shouting, swearing drivers roused him. The breeze from the open sea,
blowing straight up Broadway into his face, braced him like the tonic
that it is. He straightened himself, recovered his train of thought,
stared at one of the newspapers and tried to grasp the meaning of its
head-lines. But they made only a vague impression on him.

"It's all lies," he muttered. "Lies! How could those fellows smash
ME!" And he flung the newspapers out of the hansom into the faces of
two boys seated upon the tail of a truck.

"You're drunk early," yelled one of the boys.

"That's no one-day jag," shouted the other. "It's a hang-over."

He made a wild, threatening gesture and, as his hansom drove on,
muttered and mumbled to himself, vague profanity aimed at nothing and
at everything. At the Edison Building he got out.

"Wait!" he said to the driver. He did not see the impudent smirk on
the face of the elevator boy nor the hesitating, sheepish salutation of
the door-man, uncertain how to greet the fallen king. He went straight
to his office, unlocked his desk and, just in time to save himself from
fainting, seized and half-emptied a flask of brandy he kept in a
drawer. It had been there--but untouched ever since he came to New
York and took those offices; he never drank in business hours.

His head was aching horribly and at every throb of his pulse a pain
tore through him. He rang for his messenger.

"Tell Mr.