But over one and all of my friends hung a great mystery, a
mystery that always puzzled and sometimes paralysed me, a mystery
that always set me to thinking.

Now many of my friends were decent and good-hearted fellows; yet
they were outcasts. Others were intelligent, clever and even
industrious, quite capable of holding their own with respectable
men, still they were helpless.

Others were fastidiously honest in some things, yet they were
persistent rogues who could not see the wrong or folly of
dishonesty; many of them were clear-headed in ninety-nine
directions, but in the hundredth they were muddled if not
mentally blind.

Others had known and appreciated the comforts of refined life,
yet they were happy and content amidst the horror and dirt of a
common lodging-house! Why was it that these fellows failed, and
were content to fail in life?

What is that little undiscovered something that determines their
lives and drives them from respectable society?

What compensations do they get for all the suffering and
privations they undergo? I don't know! I wish that I did! but
these things I have never been able to discover.

Many times I have put the questions to myself; many times I have
put the questions to my friends, who appear to know about as much
and just as little upon the matter as myself.