ld one know him, the book he had
been reading and which he had laid upon his little table as I entered--I
could not help noting the title for he laid it back up, open face
down--was Lecky's "History of European Morals"!

Now!

Well!

IN RETROSPECT

Two years after this visit, in a serious attempt to set down what I
really did think of him, I arranged the following thoughts with which I
closed my sketch then and which I now append for what they may be worth.
They represented my best thought concerning him then:

"Thomas Culhane belongs to that class of society which the preachers and
the world's army of conventional merchants, lawyers, judges and
reputable citizens generally are presumably, if one may judge by the
moral and religious literature of the day, trying to reach and reform.
Yet here at his sanitarium are gathered representatives of those same
orders, the so-called better element. And here we see them suddenly
dominated, mind and soul, by this being whom they, theoretically at
least, look upon as a brand to be snatched from the burning.

"As the Church and society view Culhane, so they view all life outside
their own immediate circles. Culhane is in fact a conspicuous figure
among the semi-taboo. He has been referred to in many an argument and
platform and pulpit and in the press as a type of man whose influence is
supposed to be vitiating. Now a minister enters the sanitarium, broken
down by his habits of life, and this same Culhane is able to penetrate
him, to see that his dogmatic and dictatorial mental habits are the
cause of his ailment, and he has the moral courage to shock him, to drag
him by apparently brutal processes out of his rut. He reads the man
accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a
cure.

"This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking
to labor among men. Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists,
pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so
by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and
perception. It is a fact that in the sporting world and among the
unconventional men-about-town you will often find as good if not better
judges of human nature than elsewhere. Contact with a rough and ready
and all-too-revealing world teaches them much. The world's customary
pretensions and delusions are in the main ripped away. They are bruised
by rough facts. Often the men gathered in some such cafe