get back to Australia.'

I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him
his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an
extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard
for him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so
passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destined
never to cross its threshold. Why, after all, should he not cross its
threshold? I asked him if he would like to. `What,' he growled, `would
be the good?' I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of his
nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained matters to
the foreman; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he passed with the
foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I saw him crossing the
excavated hall, crossing it along a plank, slowly and cautiously. His
attitude was very like Blondin's, but it had a certain tragic dignity
which Blondin's lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I hailed a
cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do not know.
Often as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered by it, him I
never saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight back to Australia.
Or perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him alive in the
foundations. His fate, whatever it was, haunts me.


`273'

This is an age of prescriptions. Morning after morning, from the back-
page of your newspaper, quick and uncostly cures for every human ill
thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past. But
I would raise no false hopes of myself. I am no thaumaturgist. Do
you awake with a sinking sensation in the stomach? Have you lost the