[Illustration:  “‘I cut that picture from its frame.’”]

“Oh, yes,” said he, with a smile; “Monte Cristo, and all that sort of thing.  Your notion is a perfectly natural one, but I assure you, Mr. Randolph, that it is founded upon a mistake.  Over and over and over again I have amassed wealth; but I have not been able to retain it permanently, and often I have suffered for the very necessaries of life.  I have been hungry, knowing that I could never starve.  The explanation of this state of things is simple enough:  I would trade; I would speculate; I would marry an heiress; I would become rich; for many years I would enjoy my possessions.  Then the time would come when people said:  ’Who owns these houses?’ ‘To whom belongs this money in the banks?’ ’These properties were purchased in our great-grandfathers’ times; the accounts in the banks were opened long before our oldest citizens were born.  Who is it who is making out leases and drawing checks?’ I have employed all sorts of subterfuges in order to retain my property, but I have always found that to prove my continued identity I should have to acknowledge my immortality; and in that case, of course, I should have been adjudged a lunatic, and everything would have been taken from me.  So I generally managed, before the time arrived when it was actually necessary for me to do so, to turn my property, as far as possible, into money, and establish myself in some other place as a stranger.  But there were times when I was obliged to hurry from my home and take nothing with me.  Then I knew misery.

“It was during the period of one of my greatest depressions that I met with a monk who was afterward St. Bruno, and I joined the Carthusian monastery which he founded in Calabria.  In the midst of their asceticism, their seclusion, and their silence I hoped that I might be asked no questions, and need tell no lies; I hoped that I might be allowed to live as long as I pleased without disturbance; but I found no such immunity.  When Bruno died, and his successor had followed him into the grave, it was proposed that I should be the next prior; but this would not have suited me at all.  I had employed all my time in engrossing books, but the duties of a prior were not for me, so I escaped, and went out into the world again.”

As I sat and listened to Mr. Crowder, his story seemed equally wonderful to me, whether it were a plain statement of facts or the relation of an insane dream.  It was not a wild tale, uttered in the enthusiastic excitement of a disordered mind; but it was a series of reminiscences, told quietly and calmly, here a little, there a little, without chronological order, each one touched upon as it happened to suggest itself.  From wondering I found myself every now and then believing:  but whenever I realized the folly in which I was indulging myself, I shook off my credulity and endeavored to listen with interest, but without judgment, for in this way only could I most thoroughly enjoy the strange narrative; but my lapses into unconscious belief were frequent.