linen and develops the round of his belly.  He is a bloodsucker and a vampire.  He lays unholy hands on heaven and hell at cent. per cent., and his very existence is a sacrilege and a blasphemy.  And yet here am I, wilting before him, an arrant coward, with no respect for him and less for myself.  Why should this shame be?  Let me rouse in my strength and smite him, and, by so doing, wipe clean one offensive page.

But no.  As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, and in it was the aristocrat’s undisguised contempt for the canaille.  Behind him was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society.  Law and order upheld him, while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.  Moreover, he was possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon, and he would do business with me.

I told him my desires humbly, in quavering syllables.  In return, he craved my antecedents and residence, pried into my private life, insolently demanded how many children had I and did I live in wedlock, and asked divers other unseemly and degrading questions.  Ay, I was treated like a thief convicted before the act, till I produced my certificates of goods and chattels aforementioned.  Never had they appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task.  It is said, “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury”; but he evidently was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent.  I put my signature to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.

Faugh!  I was glad to be quit of it.  How good the outside air was!  I only prayed that neither my best friend nor my worst enemy should ever become aware of what had just transpired.  Ere I had gone a block I noticed that the sun had brightened perceptibly, the street become less sordid, the gutter mud less filthy.  In people’s eyes the cabbage question no longer brooded.  And there was a spring to my body, an elasticity of step as I covered the pavement.  Within me coursed an unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves and buds and green things.  My brain was clear and refreshed.  There was a new strength to my arm.  My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with the times.  All men were my brothers.  Save one—­yes, save one.  I would go back and wreck the establishment.  I would disrupt that leather-bound volume, violate that black skullcap, burn the accounts.  But before fancy could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed.  Nor did I marvel at my new-horn might, at my ancient dignity which had returned.  There was a tinkling chink as I ran the yellow pieces through my fingers, and with the golden music rippling round me I caught a deeper insight into the mystery of things.

Oakland, California. 
February 1900.