of.  But alack-a-day!  While my heels thrust the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering, like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity--men, women, and children without end.  They had no concern with me, nor I with them.  I knew it; I felt it.  Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the world, I dwindled in my own sight.  My feet were uncertain and heavy, and my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the middle.  People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I can swear they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are your cabbages?

So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive glances directing my progress.  At last I came hard by the place, and peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold mc, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.  ’Fore God!  I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man, nor did I contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil.  Why?  I do not know, save that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being devoid of the one I was destitute of the other.  The person I sought practised a profession as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative.  It is mentioned in Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day.  Nor is it unfair to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to final balance.

Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit, that I entered the Presence.  To confess that I was shocked were to do my feelings an injustice.  Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock, Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of individual.  This man—­why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue, with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the normal pallor of sedentary existence.  He was reading a book, sober and leather-bound, while on his finely moulded, intellectual head reposed a black skull-cap.  For all the world his look and attitude were those of a college professor.  My heart gave a great leap.  Here was hope!  But no; he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed.  I communed with myself:  By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery.  His nerve centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency of others.  He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune.  He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs himself in clean