seem to him."

Once again his fingers, hopeless as his eyes, felt over the region of
his coat and waistcoat-pockets, wandered nervelessly to his
trousers-pockets--empty all! How many a time had they flown there in
the last few weeks to make the same discovery--a discovery causing a
shock at first, surprise, incredulity, anger; of late, mechanically
only, quite hopelessly.

And only a short time ago his pockets had been so well lined! He had
been in debt, it is true, but money had been forthcoming for who cared
to take. No beggar, however "professional," however visibly lying, had
ever asked of him in vain. He had squandered, in a society his father's
son should never have known, the fortune his father had left him; his
extravagance had been mad, his self-indulgence unlimited; but it must
be told of him that the occasion on which he most bitterly felt his
present poverty was such an one as this. He missed so much--all that
made life worth living in that foolish whirl "from gilded bar to gilded
bar" which was all his manhood's experience: his credit at his
tailor's, the cigars he had smoked and given away, his daily games of
billiards (the one thing at which he had excelled in all his wasted
life was billiards, his fingers sometimes itched with the longing to
feel the cue in his hand again), all the thousand extravagances of such
a young man's day. But up to the present it was this alone which made
poverty intolerable,--the having to refuse when Want asked of him.

He watched the tramp hobbling painfully into the distance, and in his
pale blue eyes came that pricking which is of tears.

"His blistered feet!" he said. "His blistered feet!"

And then very slowly he lifted one of his own long legs and laid it at
the ankle upon the other knee, and touching his slender, high-arched
foot very gingerly, he bent his head and examined his own boot.

Yes; there, sure enough, was the crack in the leather he had first
discovered yesterday, and which had caused him a sleepless night. The
first crack in his last pair of boots!

The lower lip of that small mouth which had been used to laugh at such
foolish nothings, and which now so easily drooped to grieving, fell
open as he looked. The crack was quite close to the sole and was
scarcely noticeable yet, but it would take--how few days! to widen to a
considerable gap! Then the people of the town in which he had been
born, through which he had ridden his father's horses, and drive