home had become
the resort of a crew of empty-headed coxcombs.

I wondered whether they were gone. I looked at the clock. It was
half-past twelve--Sunday morning. I opened my bedroom door and crept
downstairs. No; they were not gone--they had merely moved on to supper.

My library was in the front of the house, across the hall from the
drawing room, and I went in there and sank into an armchair by the fire.
The bridge party was making a great to-do and its strident laughter
floated up from below. By contrast the quiet library seemed a haven of
refuge. Here were the books I might have read--which might have been my
friends. Poor fool that I was!

I put out my hand and took down the first it encountered--John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress. It was a funny old volume--a priceless early edition
given me by a grateful client whom I had extricated from some
embarrassment. I had never read it, but I knew its general trend. It was
about some imaginary miserable who, like myself, wanted to do things
differently. I took a cigar out of my pocket, lit it and, opening the
book haphazard, glanced over the pages in a desultory fashion.

"_That is that which I seek for, even to be rid of this heavy Burden;
but get it off myself, I cannot; nor is there any man in our country
that can take it off my shoulders_--"

So the Pilgrim had a burden too! I turned back to the beginning and read
how Christian, the hero, had been made aware of his perilous condition.

"_In this plight therefore he went home, and refrained himself as long
as he could, that his Wife and Children should not perceive his
distress, but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble
increased: Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his Wife and
Children; and thus he began to talk to them: 'Oh, my dear Wife,' said
he, 'and you the Children of my bowels, I, your dear Friend, am in
myself undone by reason of a Burden that lieth hard upon me.' ... At
this his_ _Relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that
what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some
frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing toward
night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all
haste they got him to bed: But the night was as troublesome to him as
the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and
tears_."

Surely this Pilgrim was strangely like myself! And, though sorely beset,
he had struggled on his