landscape, a wandering minstrel or picker of daisies?"

"What are you 'anyway,' my friend?" I thereupon took occasion to
ask. "Who are you? kindly tell me."

The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had
offended him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his
umbrella before answering. "Who am I?" he said at last. "My name
is Clement Searle. I was born in New York, and that's the
beginning and the end of me."

"Ah not the end!" I made bold to plead.

"Then it's because I HAVE no end--any more than an ill-written
book. I just stop anywhere; which means I'm a failure," the poor
man all lucidly and unreservedly pursued: "a failure, as hopeless
and helpless, sir, as any that ever swallowed up the slender
investments of the widow and the orphan. I don't pay five cents
on the dollar. What I might have been--once!--there's nothing
left to show. I was rotten before I was ripe. To begin with,
certainly, I wasn't a fountain of wisdom. All the more reason for
a definite channel--for having a little character and purpose.
But I hadn't even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as
they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn
through New York to-day and you'll find the tattered remnants of
these things dangling on every bush and fluttering in every
breeze; the men to whom I lent money, the women to whom I made
love, the friends I trusted, the follies I invented, the
poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing was worth a
thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I