Ministers began to preach sermons against “Ephemera,” and one, who too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.  The great poem contributed to the gayety of the world.  The comic verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of “Ephemera” would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river.

Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.  The effect produced upon him was one of great sadness.  In the crash of his whole world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash indeed.  Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines, and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find it out for himself.  The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more.  Well, he was done, he solaced himself.  He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.  The visions of Tahiti—­clean, sweet Tahiti—­were coming to him more frequently.  And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers.  The South Seas were calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would answer the call.

In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge.  When The Parthenon check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden’s affairs for his family.  Martin took a receipt for the check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had let him have.

The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese restaurants.  At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the tide turned.  But it had turned too late.  Without a thrill he opened a thick envelope from The Millennium, scanned the face of a check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was the payment on acceptance for “Adventure.”  Every debt he owed in the world, including the pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hundred dollars.  And when he had paid everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden’s lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket.  He ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best cafes in town.  He still slept in his little room at Maria’s, but the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to cease from calling him “hobo” and “tramp” from the roofs of woodsheds and over back fences.