I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave,"
--_W.E. Henley_.

His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a
widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day
to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations.
I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his
given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a
little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since
looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I
suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me
sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his
fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must,
he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make
himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above
sending stories of love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot
journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many
hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the
world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations
and troubles of a young man are almost as holy as those of a maiden.
Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first
opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honorable, but,
at the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way
about the world as befitted a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week.
He rhymed "dove" with "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly believed
that they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays
he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on,