l dressed, because he was fifty dollars in debt to
the bank, and owed a tailor's bill in Banfield.... Invariably thoughts
of the girl he knew he loved brought him misery and despondency.
Thoughts of home brought him little less. He might have known, from
that, that either he or the bank was a failure; but a fellow of
nineteen looks through a smoked glass. To say that Evan did not think
is scarcely the fact. He did think, but spasmodically. The mind is a
dual thing: the superficial mind can be employed on an adding machine
and leave the thinking function free to operate in any direction; but
before that is possible the superficial mind must be familiar with the
object that engages it. It is not an easy matter to figure sterling
exchange, for instance, and at the same time think about irrelevant
things; but it is easy to run an adding machine, or even to add, and
think simultaneously. On the cash book Evan found himself engaged in
all kinds of work; on some of it he had to concentrate (although no
"brain power" was necessary), while on some of it he worked
mechanically. Whenever a period of serious dissatisfaction, brought on
by something Robb or Key had said, troubled him, it was of short
duration: something always broke into his mind and scattered the
argument framing there. By the time he was free to resume the argument
foreign thoughts had intervened, and his brain was in a muddle. Before
the muddle could be dissipated by a cold point of common sense,
something else had come along. And so things went. So the days and
weeks went.

When Evan got a night off, sick and tired of struggling with figures
and fancies, he indulged in some of the exciting amusements of the
city, which were new and attractive to him, and in "quiet little
games." He was slipping into a rut, and probably he would have stayed
there for months or even years, like hundreds of other young Canadian
bankboys, had not the poverty of his existence driven him to the
temporary form of relief known among bankclerks as "kiting."

"Bankclerks are always hard up." This is one of the public's
chestnuts. It is not a horse-chestnut, however; this one is
digestible. It is a fact. The reason is, chiefly--poor pay. It is
absolutely necessary for a fellow to either get money from home (even
after three years' service) or to borrow and fly kites. Kite-flying is
the last resort. It is simply a matter of cashing a cheque on your own
bank through som