ned, it is true, over and over to the voice which murmured
"Once upon a time," but he sat not by a comfortable open grate, amid
grandchildren. Instead, he lurked in East Fourteenth Street amid
decaying agents' offices, hunting a chance to do a bad monologue in a
worse vaudeville show. He had outlasted his time; he could not get work.
He lived on those two heartless things, Hope and Memory. And for all I
know he is living on them yet.

Now, you will not in your careless youth or your sceptical maturity find
beauty in this story, you will not "get under the skin" of it, as the
saying is, unless you have stopped sometime in your busy going, to
consider, aside and with understanding, the pathos of the old actor. It
is a curiously poignant human thing, written about by a few, suffered by
many, and ignored by the loud, inordinate world.

The old actor out of employment! A target for jokes, a piece of
battered, ancient "property" cluttering up a new and very busy stage.
You smile at his curious figure, unconscious of the broken misery that
aches beneath, where life has died and living goes paradoxically on;
and only sometimes late at night do you get a part of that hidden ache
when you hear old legs drag weary feet up the boarding-house stairs,
past your door and on up into the skylight room on the roof,
despondently to bed; and you know that the old man has had another
unsuccessful day among the agents and the managers. You can sometimes
interpret the querulous little laugh over the thin oatmeal at breakfast,
sometimes you can guess the water in the rapidly winking eyes; but of
course you do not proclaim your deductions. Civilization is a process of
making less noise about things.

This is a segment of the life-film of Harry Barnes, old actor, as he
traveled the stones of Fourteenth Street. Not the Rialto, where fat men
adorned with fat diamonds smoke fat cigars in order to narcotize fat
consciences; but Fourteenth Street, grimy with old, sparsely-tenanted
buildings, where theatrical offices three flights up bargain for the
driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville
houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat
among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling over
bread-and-water salaries with the jetsam of a too-volatile profession.

Harry was old and dropsical with drink, a sad hero for a careless story.
The only ideal he had ever had, besides one, was to