gliness into the sky.

In this city I had starved for three solid months, picking up a meal
where I could find it. I had been without a bed for three weeks. I had
shared begged food with beggars. Now I came back to it under far
different circumstances. I walked in the afternoon to some of my old
haunts, and, coming to the hideous den of a common lodging-house where I
had once lived, my flesh crept. I remembered that once the agent for a
directory had put down "Charles Roberts, labourer," as living there and
I tried to get back into my old skin. For a while I succeeded, but the
experiment was horrible, and I was glad to drop the dead past and leave
the grimy water front where I had looked and looked in vain for work.

For a week I stayed in San Francisco. Then I had an experience which
falls to few men, for I went to stay as a visitor at Los Guilucos, where
I had once been a stableman. The situation was interesting, for there
were still many men in the ranch who had worked with me; even the
Chinese cook was there. In the old days he had often appealed to me for
more wood to give his devouring dragon of a stove. But things were
altered now. On the first morning of my stay I saw the wood pile, and
could not help taking my coat off and lighting into it with the axe. The
Chinaman came running out with uplifted hands.

"Oh, Mr Loberts, Mr Loberts, you no splittee me wood, you too much welly
kind gentleman, you no splittee me wood!"

So things change, but I split him a barrow load all the same.

I was sorry to leave the ranch and go back to San Francisco, where nine
men out of ten in all degrees of society are much too disagreeable for
words. The only really decent fellows I met there were a Frenchman and a
young mining engineer named Brandt, son of Dr Brandt, at Royat, who was
once R. L. Stevenson's physician; and above all an Irish surveyor and
architect, the most charming and genial of men. The Californians
themselves are less worth knowing as they appear to have money; the
moment they begin to fancy themselves a cut above the vulgar, their
vulgarity is their chief feature, stupendous as the Rocky Mountains, as
obvious as the Grand Duke of Johannisberg's nose. But I had other things
to think of than the social parodies of the Slope.

I found at the Poste Restante a letter from my agent, which was a frank
statement of misfortune and ill-luck. There was not a red cent in it,
and I had only a hundred dollars left. This wa