e decent and good-hearted fellows; yet they
were outcasts. Others were intelligent, clever and even industrious,
quite capable of holding their own with respectable men, still they were
helpless.

Others were fastidiously honest in some things, yet they were persistent
rogues who could not see the wrong or folly of dishonesty; many of them
were clear-headed in ninety-nine directions, but in the hundredth they
were muddled if not mentally blind.

Others had known and appreciated the comforts of refined life, yet
they were happy and content amidst the horror and dirt of a common
lodging-house! Why was it that these fellows failed, and were content to
fail in life?

What is that little undiscovered something that determines their lives
and drives them from respectable society?

What compensations do they get for all the suffering and privations they
undergo? I don't know! I wish that I did! but these things I have never
been able to discover.

Many times I have put the questions to myself; many times I have put the
questions to my friends, who appear to know about as much and just as
little upon the matter as myself.

They do not realise that in reality they do differ from ordinary
citizens; I realise the difference, but can find no reason for it.

No! it is not drink, although a few of them were dipsomaniacs, for
generally they were sober men.

I will own my ignorance, and say that I do not know what that little
something is that makes a man into a criminal instead of constituting
him into a hero. This I do know: that but for the possession of a
little something, many of my friends, now homeless save when they are
in prison, would be performing life's duties in settled and comfortable
homes, and would be quite as estimable citizens as ordinary people.

Probably they would prove better citizens than the majority of people,
for while they possess some inherent weakness, they also possess in a
great degree many estimable qualities which are of little use in their
present life.

These friends of mine not only visit my office and invade my home, but
they turn up at all sorts of inconvenient times and places.--There is my
friend the dipsomaniac, the pocket Hercules, the man of brain and iron
constitution.

Year after year he holds on to his own strange course, neither poverty
nor prison, delirium tremens nor physical injuries serve to alter him.
He occupies a front seat at a men's meeting on Sunday afternoon when