out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his
poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and
surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without
drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had
saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would
have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his
pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking
neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his
arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls,
literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the
miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for
creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public
traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic
occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly
removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic.

Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along
Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and
joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a
certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against
a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man
was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply
pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly
he was very unhappy--unhappy over some mysterious something that one or
two kindly 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