."

Yet in a few days your wild and woolly man is transformed, and no longer
does your sympathy go out towards him. Shaven and shorn, clad in silken
underwear, with patent leather shoes, and a suit in New York style, you
absolutely fail to recognise him as your friend of the moccasins and
mackinaw coat. He is smoking a dollar Laranago, he has half a dozen
whiskies "under his belt," and later on he has a "date" with a lady
singer of the Pavilion Theatre. He is having a "whale" of a good time,
he tells you; you wonder how long he will last.

Not for long. Sharp and short and sweet it is. He is brought up with a
jerk, and the Dago Queen, for whom he has bought so much wine at twenty
dollars a bottle, has no recognition for him in her flashing eyes. He
has been "taken down the line," "trimmed to a finish" by an artist in
the business. Ruefully he turns his poke inside out--not a "colour." He
cannot even command the price of a penitential three-fingers of rye.
Such is one of the commonest phases of life in the gold-camp.

As I strolled the streets I saw many a familiar face. Mosher I saw. He
had grown very fat, and was talking to a diminutive woman with heavy
blond hair (she must have weighed about ninety-five pounds, I think).
They went off together.

A knife-edged wind was sweeping down from the north, and men in bulging
coonskin coats filled up the sidewalks. At the Aurora corner I came
across the Jam-wagon. He was wearing a jacket of summer flannels, and,
as if to suggest extra warmth, he had turned up its narrow collar. In
his trembling fingers he held an emaciated cigarette, which he inhaled
avidly. He looked wretched, pinched with hunger, peaked with cold, but
he straightened up when he saw me into a semblance of well-being. Then,
in a little, he sagged forward, and his eyes went dull and abject. It
was a business of the utmost delicacy to induce him to accept a small
loan. I knew it would only plunge him more deeply into the mire; but I
could not bear to see him suffer.

I went into the Parisian Restaurant. It was more glittering, more
raffish, more clamant of the tenderloin than ever. There were men
waiters in the conventional garb of waiterdom, and there was Madam,
harder looking and more vulturish. You wondered if such a woman could
have a soul, and what was the end and aim of her being. There she sat, a
creature of rapacity and sordid lust. I marched up to her and asked
abruptly:

"Where's Berna?"

She g