ated
by perpetual gin, "for God's sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor
fern-collector!"--turning up his stale daisies. "Food hasn't passed my
lips, gentlemen, for the last three days." We gaped at him and at each
other, and to our imagination his appeal had almost the force of a
command. "I wonder if half-a-crown would help?" I privately wailed. And
our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with the grace
of controlled stupefaction still further enriching his outline.

"I feel as if I had seen my Doppelganger," said Searle. "He reminds me
of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the landscape, a wandering
minstrel or picker of daisies?"

"What are you 'anyway,' my friend?" I thereupon took occasion to ask.
"Who are you? kindly tell me."

The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had offended
him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his umbrella before
answering. "Who am I?" he said at last. "My name is Clement Searle. I
was born in New York, and that's the beginning and the end of me."

"Ah not the end!" I made bold to plead.

"Then it's because I HAVE no end--any more than an ill-written book. I
just stop anywhere; which means I'm a failure," the poor man all lucidly
and unreservedly pursued: "a failure, as hopeless and helpless, sir, as
any that ever swallowed up the slender investments of the widow and
the orphan. I don't pay five cents on the dollar. What I might have
been--once!--there's nothing left to show. I was rotten before I was
ripe. To begin with, certainly, I wasn't a fountain of wisdom. All the
more reason for a definite channel--for having a little character and
purpose. But I hadn't even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as
they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn through
New York to-day and you'll find the tattered remnants of these things
dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze; the men to whom
I lent money, the women to whom I made love, the friends I trusted, the
follies I invented, the poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing
was worth a thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I
believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe
in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal, certainly--if
you've got one; but most people haven't. Pleasure would be right if it
were pleasure straight through; but it never is. My taste was to be the
best in the world; well, perhap