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'hôte, 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