himself and devour on the spot or carry away casually in his hand for
consumption elsewhere. Thousands of unfortunate men get their sole
subsistence in this way in New York, and experience soon teaches where,
for the price of a single drink, a man can take away almost a meal of
chip potatoes, sausage, bits of bread, and even eggs. The Frenchman and
the Dane knew their way about, and Blake looked forward to a supper more
or less substantial before pulling his mattress out of the cupboard and
turning in upon the floor for the night.

Meanwhile he could enjoy a quiet and lonely evening with the room all to
himself.

In the daytime he was a reporter on an evening newspaper of sensational
and lying habits. His work was chiefly in the police courts; and in his
spare hours at night, when not too tired or too empty, he wrote sketches
and stories for the magazines that very rarely saw the light of day on
their printed and paid-for sentences. On this particular occasion he was
deep in a most involved tale of a psychological character, and had just
worked his way into a sentence, or set of sentences, that completely
baffled and muddled him.

He was fairly out of his depth, and his brain was too poorly supplied
with blood to invent a way out again. The story would have been
interesting had he written it simply, keeping to facts and feelings, and
not diving into difficult analysis of motive and character which was
quite beyond him. For it was largely autobiographical, and was meant to
describe the adventures of a young Englishman who had come to grief in
the usual manner on a Canadian farm, had then subsequently become
bar-keeper, sub-editor on a Methodist magazine, a teacher of French and
German to clerks at twenty-five cents per hour, a model for artists, a
super on the stage, and, finally, a wanderer to the goldfields.

Blake scratched his head, and dipped the pen in the inkpot, stared out
through the blindless windows, and sighed deeply. His thoughts kept
wandering to food, beefsteak and steaming vegetables. The smell of
cooking that came from a lower floor through the broken windows was a
constant torment to him. He pulled himself together and again attacked
the problem.

" . . . for with some people," he wrote, "the imagination is so vivid as
to be almost an extension of consciousness. . . ." But here he stuck
absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to
finish the sentence puzzled him into bl