als at this restaurant. I
know just how much onion they put in things--if I went to the next
place I shouldn't. And I always take the same streets to come
here--I've been doing it for ten years now. I know at which crossings
to look out--I know what I'm going to see in the shop-windows. It saves
a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I
never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think
that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at
me like a tramp from a ditch."

He paused calmly to knock the ashes from his cigar, and Garnett said
with a smile: "Doesn't such a plan of life cut off nearly all the
possibilities?"

The old gentleman made a contemptuous motion. "Possibilities of what?
Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of being
miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is
to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to
be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."

"That was Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said, pouring
his wine with the smile of youthful incredulity.

"I guess he hadn't the monopoly," responded his friend. "Lots of people
have found out the secret--the trouble is that so few live up to it."

He rose from his seat, pushing the table forward, and standing passive
while the waiter advanced with his shabby overcoat and umbrella. Then
he nodded to Garnett, lifted his hat politely to the broad-bosomed lady
behind the desk, and passed out into the street.

Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged
views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other's
names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him mainly
in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a dingy
hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its nearness
to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two Americans had made
acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in frequenting the place arose,
in the end, less from the excellence of the food than from the
enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy
sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett's trade
introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and
homely flavor of a native dish--one of the domestic compounds for which
the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a mark of the old man's
impers