My sympathies of course are all the other way. 'He
ought to be sewing shoes in the penitentiary,' one paper once said of
me. Another advised me to try something that was not above my
intelligence, such as breaking rock or shoveling dirt. Most of them
agreed, however," he added with a humorous twitch of his large,
expressive mouth, "that I'll do very well if I will only stay where I
am, or, better yet, get out of here. They want me to leave. That's the
best solution for them."

He seemed to repress a smile that was hovering on his lips.

"The voice of the enemy," I commented.

"Yes, sir, the voice of the enemy," he added. "But don't think that I
think I'm done for. Not at all. I have just returned to my old ways in
order to think this thing out. In a year or two I'll have solved my
problem, I hope. I may have to leave here, and I may not. Anyhow, I'll
turn up somewhere, with something."

He did have to leave, however, public opinion never being allowed to
revert to him again, and five years later, in a fairly comfortable
managerial position in New York, he died. He had made a fight, well
enough, but the time, the place, the stars, perhaps, were not quite
right. He had no guiding genius, possibly, to pull him through.
Adherents did not flock to him and save him. Possibly he wasn't magnetic
enough--that pagan, non-moral, non-propagandistic quality, anyhow. The
fates did not fight for him as they do for some, those fates that ignore
the billions and billions of others who fail. Yet are not all lives more
or less failures, however successful they may appear to be at one time
or another, contrasted, let us say, with what they hoped for? We
compromise so much with everything--our dreams and all.

As for his reforms, they may be coming fast enough, or they may not. _In
medias res._

But as for him...?

_W.L.S._

Life's little ironies are not always manifest. We hear distant rumbling
sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the
reality. Therefore the real incidents which I am about to relate may
have some value.

I first called upon W.L. S----, Jr., in the winter of 1895. I had known
of him before only by reputation, or, what is nearer the truth, by
seeing his name in one of the great Sunday papers attached to several
drawings of the most lively interest. These drawings depicted night
scenes of the city of New York, and appeared as colored supplements,
eleven by eighteen inches. They r