one of Mr. Tarbox's many maxims was, never to make one day pay for
another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this
season--this Louisiana campaign, as he called it--he had developed a
new art,--making each day pay for itself several times over.

"Many of these people," he said,--but said it solely and silently to
himself,--"are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even
when they're not they're out of the current, as it were; they haven't
headway; and so they never--or seldom ever--see any way to make money
except somehow in connection with the plantations. There's no end of
chances here to a man that's got money-sense, and nerve to use it." He
wrote that to Zosephine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed
that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance
or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his
sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some
unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought
into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at
what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.

"Give me the gains other men pass by," he said, "and I'll be
satisfied. The saying is, 'Buy wisdom;' but I sell mine. I like to
sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an
adventure. And if there's any thing I love, it's an adventure with
money in it! But even that isn't my chief pleasure: my chief
pleasure's the study of human nature.

'The proper study of mankind is man.
* * * * *
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.'"

This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr.
Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "Isn't that
what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as
he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would
respond, "Yes, that's so."

And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were
thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.

Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of
Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing
finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far
down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party
that Claude was not with him.

"He didn't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when