This firm combined a stationery store on Nassau Street with their printing-house in William Street. Mr. Sackett was in charge of the printing-establishment, Mr. Mackay of the stationery store. This was fortunate for me, as Mr. Sackett came to love me while Mackay hated me as poison. It has always been so. My world has been made up of friends and enemies. I have never been the object of mere indifference. I have never been surprised at Mackay's hatred, but Sackett's love has been my wonder. He was to me as a father and I to him as a son. He would watch over me and if I ran short of money in the middle of the week the safe was opened and five dollars was in my hand. I kept the books and ran the errands after a fashion, but that is all. This job was not my real job that was still waiting for me.

When I had been on this job for a week or two, Mr. Sackett told me to take a package and carry it to such a number on Pearl Street. I had seen Pearl Street up on Broadway. I went up to Broadway till I came to Pearl; following its curve for more than half an hour. When I came to my number, I looked up and there I was within one minute's walk from my starting-point. I said nothing to Mr. Sackett and he said nothing to me, only looked at me with a frown. In a few days I said, "Mr. Sackett, what's the matter with Pearl Street?" He said, "Why do you ask?" I said, "When you told me, the other day, to go to such a number on Pearl Street, I went up to Pearl Street on Broadway and began to walk and walk and when I came to the number I wanted, it was right down there." Mr. Sackett laughed and he said, "That is why you were so long doing that errand-I thought it strange." "Yes," I said, "that was the reason"; and he said, "Pearl Street is an old cowpath from the ancient village of New Amsterdam to the cow pastures. The Dutchmen gradually built their houses along the path and you have the crookedest

street in the world." I laughed and said, "Are there other crooked streets in the city?" He said, "Plenty." I said, "The next time you tell me to go anywhere, I will ask you how to get there." He said, "Correct, my lad; always ask when you don't know; it is a good rule."

It was nearly four miles from my boarding-house to my office and I usually took the horse car in the morning. It was an hour's ride at the best and might be an hour and a half or two hours. I started at about six so as to be sure of reaching the office at eight. I used this otherwise waste time in reading. I remember one morning in the car I was reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." A fine-looking man who was sitting next to me took the book from my hand, looked at it, handed it back, saying, “Young man, if you keep up such reading as this, you will amount to something in the world." I said, "Thank you, sir; I am reading to pass the time." The stranger said, "Yes, I see. You read for the love of reading; that shows the bent of your mind. We shall hear from you in the future." My heart glowed at this word of approval. How must the New Yorker of to-day laugh at this story! "This Crapsey fellow," he will say, “is the champion liar, reading a book in the street car. Weren't there any newspapers in those old days, and how did he hang on his strap?" It does seem ridiculous, but it is true.

This reading, however, had its drawback; it might be preparing me for future importance, but it was a decided hindrance to my present work. When I should have been concentrating my attention on the column of figures before me, I was standing with Constantine on Malvian Bridge on that fatal day, when he saw in the midday sky the flaming Cross, underneath which were written the words, "By this Conquer." When walking about the streets I often went by my destination, following in my thought the flight of the Moors as Charles Martel, the Hammerer,

drove them from the field of Tours and so saved Europe for Christianity. One day when lost in such a vision of the past, when I was listening to the shrieks of the Picts and Scots as the legions of Agricola were slaughtering them in the Cheviot Hills, Mr. Mackay came on me as I was standing at gaze, seeing nothing, and he cursed me for an idle fool. "Damn you," he said, "what are you standing here for? I can't see why Sackett keeps such a lazy loon as you about the place. If I'd had my way, you'd been sacked long ago."

At this rebuke, I came out of my waking dream with a start, went up to my work, resolving never to read another page of Gibbon. But, alas, habit is habit and the reading went on. Fortunately, my affairs so shaped themselves that I was able to reconcile my reading with my duty.

A

CHAPTER XIII

THE CALL TO PREACH

NY large city is a dangerous place for a young man loose on the world. Strange women on the streets

offer themselves at a price for the gratification of his strongest passion. In the seventies there was no police interference, to speak of, with this traffic of women. As soon as it is dark these outcasts were parading, offering to sell their love to anyone who would buy. That I did not fall into this pit of destruction was owing to my timidity and my poverty. I had neither the courage nor the money to enter upon such a vicious course. The daughter of my landlady was a temptation, not to coarse vice, but to destructive marriage. She was the sister of the buxom blonde who opened the door for me when I came looking for a room. In my loneliness I kept company with this girl and was drifting into a situation that would have resulted in marriage. There would have been no harm in this had my lot lain along the lower level of business life, but for me it would have been fatal. I was unfit for that lower level of business life, where she would have held me. I should never have been able to earn a decent living with such companionship. I shudder to think of it.

Nature saved me from this disaster by the homœopathic method. She cured me of women by woman. There was in my boarding-house a woman, my senior by twelve years, who rescued me from this danger. She was an Irish woman, with all the vivacity and wit of her race. She was a

music-teacher by profession, a pianist of rare power with a singing voice strong and melodious. As the name of this woman belongs to a sacred past, that past shall cover it. I shall call her my Mary. We had been in the house together more than two months before she so much as took notice of me. I was a hall-roomer, while Mary with a friend occupied one of the largest, best-furnished rooms in the house. In the boarding-house social ranks are maintained as strictly as in the outer world. The hall-roomers may sit up with the landlady's daughter but not with her high-and-mightiness who sleeps in the chambre de luxe on the second floor front. It was the landlady who brought us together. She told my Mary what a nice young man I was, what a fine talker And my Mary sniffed. But for all that, her curiosity was aroused and she stopped one evening and engaged me in conversation. We were mutually attracted. She was vivacious and I was not stupid. She spoke to me the next night and the next, and then to my joy she invited me to her room and I was lost; without knowing it, I was in my first passion-that most delightful of all passions, the passion of a youth for an older woman. For some reason which I could never fathom, my landlady moved me from my hall bedroom to the hall bedroom next to the chamber of my Mary. When I came home and found myself transferred in this unauthorized way, I was very angry. I was very angry. I did not want my Mary, by any chance, to see my broken shoes and shabby clothing. When I stormed at the landlady's elder daughter, the buxom blonde, she said, "We had a chance to rent your room with the next room to a family, and what kick have you comin' anyhow?-ain't you right next to your Mary?" Then I blushed and was more angry than ever to think that my sacred passion was boarding-house gossip. The next day I went looking for another room, but could not find one to my liking. I was soon reconciled to