-classes. Indeed, it seemed to me that
he kept himself poor meeting their dues, for I remember more than one
occasion when he appealed to me in distress because he had to send
fifteen dollars to the treasurer of the Tuesdays or the Fridays and the
pater had forgotten to remit his allowance. Tom Marshall's father was
the most forgetful of men.

I liked him. You could not help liking him. He was so thoroughly
good-natured and affable. His conversation was by no means
instructive, but there was an airiness about his views and ambitions
which was restful to one who was taking life as seriously as was I in
those days. I got to know him by having constantly to let him in. Of
all the lodgers in the house, I was the most likely to be up late, and
if one of the forgetful old gentlemen fastened the door-chain, to me
would fall the duty of answering the signals of distress from the stoop.

Tom Marshall has played but a small part in my life. Like that of
Boller of '89, his place in the cast is a minor one. He is one of
those who fall in near the end of the line when the company joins hands
to sidle across the stage, bowing and smiling, after the second act.
Yet without him I wonder sometimes how my own play would have ended.
It seems to me now as though he must have been born in Pogatuck, as
though his whole life had been ordered, his love of going out
developed, so that at the proper moment he might enter the stage where
I was playing the hero to an empty house. He entered it at one o'clock
in the morning. The door was chained. At the moment I was sitting in
my room, on my one comfortable chair, my book on the floor at my side,
my pipe in my mouth, and I was smoking very hard. What countless pipes
I had smoked in this same way since the night, a month before, when I
had dined with Rufus Blight! What countless nights I had sat in this
same way, in this same month, with my book on the floor and my mind
revolving ceaselessly in a circle! This night I had come to that part
of the circle where I thought of Penelope, the lovely, the formal, the
distant Penelope, when down in the depths of the house I heard the
muffled clatter of the bell and faint rat-tats upon the front door. I
went to the window and put out my head, to see on the stoop the muffled
black figure of Tom Marshall.

"It was old Ransome again, I'll bet you," he said, when I had unchained
the door and we stood in the dimly lighted hall. "This is the third