[Illustration: "'I CUT THAT PICTURE FROM ITS FRAME.'"]

"Oh, yes," said he, with a smile; "Monte Cristo, and all that sort of
thing. Your notion is a perfectly natural one, but I assure you, Mr.
Randolph, that it is founded upon a mistake. Over and over and over again
I have amassed wealth; but I have not been able to retain it permanently,
and often I have suffered for the very necessaries of life. I have been
hungry, knowing that I could never starve. The explanation of this state
of things is simple enough: I would trade; I would speculate; I would
marry an heiress; I would become rich; for many years I would enjoy my
possessions. Then the time would come when people said: 'Who owns these
houses?' 'To whom belongs this money in the banks?' 'These properties were
purchased in our great-grandfathers' times; the accounts in the banks were
opened long before our oldest citizens were born. Who is it who is making
out leases and drawing checks?' I have employed all sorts of subterfuges
in order to retain my property, but I have always found that to prove my
continued identity I should have to acknowledge my immortality; and in
that case, of course, I should have been adjudged a lunatic, and
everything would have been taken from me. So I generally managed, before
the time arrived when it was actually necessary for me to do so, to turn
my property, as far as possible, into money, and establish myself in some
other place as a stranger. But there were times when I was obliged to
hurry from my home and take nothing with me. Then I knew misery.

"It was during the period of one of my greatest depressions that I met
with a monk who was afterward St. Bruno, and I joined the Carthusian
monastery which he founded in Calabria. In the midst of their asceticism,
their seclusion, and their silence I hoped that I might be asked no
questions, and need tell no lies; I hoped that I might be allowed to live