f
goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and
journeyed townward. I was yet a man. There was naught in those
certificates to be ashamed of. But alack-a-day! While my heels thrust
the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering,
like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity--men, women,
and children without end. They had no concern with me, nor I with them.
I knew it; I felt it. Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the
world, I dwindled in my own sight. My feet were uncertain and heavy, and
my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the
middle. People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I
can swear they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are
your cabbages?

So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive
glances directing my progress. At last I came hard by the place, and
peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold
me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.
'Fore God! I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man, nor did I
contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil. Why? I do not know, save
that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being devoid of the one I
was destitute of the other. The person I sought practised a profession
as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative. It is mentioned in
Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the
world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of
kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day. Nor is it unfair
to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be
closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to
final balance.

Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit,
that I entered the Presence. To confess that I was shocked were to do my
feelings an injustice. Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock,
Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of
individual. This man--why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue,
with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the
normal pallor of sedentary existence. He was reading a book, sober and
leather-bound, while on his finely moulded, intellectual head reposed a
black skull-cap. For all the world his look and attitude were tho