That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the limit of our friend’s endurance.  The additional ten dollars or so needed for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways.  Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far into the night.  He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote “Sunday stories,” which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting lover of literature can fall.  Once in a while he gave a lecture on poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in the same place.  By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first year.  His royalties on this amounted to $348.30—­not one-third as much, he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short story.  He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature.

It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton’s relatives, back in Indiana, were wrong when they wrote to him admiringly—­as they did twice a year—­asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man of letters in the great city.  They did not know that for ten years Mr. Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and so often.  He could not afford it.  When friends from out of town called on him, he took them to Peck’s for a French table d’hote, with an apologetic murmur.

But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or discontented.  Those who have experienced the excitements of the existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again, with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it.  The characters in George Gissing’s Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary.  But he was one of those estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their wives and keep none in their trousers.  And though his life was arduous and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books, and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in New York.  His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary essays, which he intended to call “Casual Ablutions,” after the famous sign in the British Museum washroom.

It was Mr. Stockton’s custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row.  Generally he left home about ten o’clock, thus avoiding the rush of traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind, and he would be at his desk a little after eleven.  There he would work until one o’clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their tasks.  At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then be at his desk steadily from two until six.  Dinner at home was at seven, and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof until past midnight.