questioners tried in vain to discover.  As we all stood helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said “Forget it”—­no more—­and was gone like a flash on his way.  The old man fumbled the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look on the faces of the little crowd.  It was almost as if something supernatural had happened.  All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up the street.  I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up with him—­for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger thing.  Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so small a sum?  No; millionaires never have fancies like that.

Another poor man’s fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, studying the faces of the passers-by.  He is too poor to afford dollar bills.  He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any other art:  the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief.  Suppose, for example, you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print.  Thought, too, is dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any more.  Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin—­at peace in Potter’s field—­who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer—­as like as not supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some newly opened restaurant.  Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying:  “Try and keep up your heart, friend; there are better days ahead”; and with the voice a hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery “Good-bye,” and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so to say, kindly legs up the street—­gone almost before you knew he was there.  I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might almost be tempted to believe in God again.  And then—­well, what would it matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin?  This is my friend’s favourite way of spending his money.  To the extent of his poor means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich men.