“Oh, yes,” I said easily, “we are comfortable people here—­and it is a good place to live.”

“No no,” he returned.  “I know, I’ve got my call—­” Then leaning forward he said in a lower, even more intense voice—­“I live everything beforehand.”

I was startled by the look of his eyes:  the abject terror of it:  and I thought to myself, “The man is not right in his mind.”  And yet I longed to know of the life within this strange husk of manhood.

“I know,” he said, as if reading my thought, “you think”—­and he tapped his forehead with one finger—­“but I’m not.  I’m as sane as you are.”

It was a strange story he told.  It seems almost unbelievable to me as I set it down here, until I reflect how little any one of us knows of the deep life within his nearest neighbour—­what stories there are, what tragedies enacted under a calm exterior!  What a drama there may be in this commonplace man buying ten pounds of sugar at the grocery store, or this other one driving his two old horses in the town road!  We do not know.  And how rarely are the men of inner adventure articulate!  Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me.  I do not question its truth.  It came as all truth does, through a clouded and unclean medium:  and any judgment of the story itself must be based upon a knowledge of the personal equation of the Ruin who told it.

“I am no tramp,” he said, “in reality, I am no tramp.  I began as well as anyone—­It doesn’t matter now, only I won’t have any of the sympathy that people give to the man who has seen better days.  I hate sentiment. I hate it——­”

I cannot attempt to set down the story in his own words.  It was broken with exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes of self-blame.  His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of the narrative really led.  He had thought so much and acted so little that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision.  And yet, withal, some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form.  “I am afraid before life,” he said.  “It makes me dizzy with thought.”

At another time he said, “If I am a tramp at all, I am a mental tramp.  I have an unanchored mind.”

It seems that he came to a realisation that there was something peculiar about him at a very early age.  He said they would look at him and whisper to one another and that his sayings were much repeated, often in his hearing.  He knew that he was considered an extraordinary child:  they baited him with questions that they might laugh at his quaint replies.  He said that as early as he could remember he used to plan situations so that he might say things that were strange and even shocking in a child.  His father was a small professor in a small college—­a “worm” he called him bitterly—­“one of those worms that bores in books and finally dries