on a loan for life, if you'll
come. A fellow only needs to pay ten dollars cash and hold down the
land six months a year for three years, and make 'reasonable
improvements.' I understand they are very lenient about improvements.
Our five hundred dollars will look after that part of it. The soil is
very fertile. I'm taking a cow with me and a clucking hen. In the
winter months we can get a job bookkeeping or lumbering; or if our crop
of onions turns out well this summer we won't need to work at all in
winter. Wire. Don't let anything penetrate your nut for the next few
hours but the word 'wire.' I must know. Don't let money keep you; if
you need some, _wire_. What I have said goes, if you will come. A. P."

Evan was sitting in the elevated when he read the letter. It had come
as he started to work and he had not had time to stop and read it at
his lodging. Again at the Bridge he read it. Around him the crowds
were surging, rushing to work with that morning vigor that looks as
though it would last forever. The merry throng about Evan seemed like
his friends; the thought that he should leave them made him lonesome.
What would he do without the morning paper? Where would he buy
peppermint chocolates at twenty-five cents a pound? Even more trivial
questions than these occupied his mind.

Stuffing the letter in his pocket, he boarded the up-town L, and got
off at Twenty-third Street. The Metropolitan tower looked disdainfully
at him: it was the New York flag-pole, and he was about to desert the
colors. At noon-hour he sat in the little restaurant on Twentieth
Street West. He had the letter memorized by this time, but he drew a
bank-book from his pocket to make sure he was familiar with its
contents. Yes, the eighty dollars were still there.

After work he was tired. He was always tired after a day's office
work. The hour before supper was always one of yawning, of hurry, dust
and reflection. Taking the subway down to the Bridge, he wedged up the
steps between two foreigners who had been regaling themselves with
garlic, and looked wistfully at Loft's. There was a candy-fiend in his
stomach crying for food. He was half way to the candy-shop when he
overcame the evil one with a sweet tooth; he turned back toward the
Bridge, but seeing a crowd in one of the newspaper offices, stepped in.
His ear caught the click of a telegraph instrument. He forgot the
crowd gazing at new aeroplane models, and found