“For God’s sake, remember what I ask of you, and send me at once so that I should cease thinking of it.  Leon, as I have told you, will give me $10, $15 he has already paid for the contract, and your $15 will make $25.  Out of this I need $10 for a ticket and $15 for two or three weeks’ board and lodging.

    “Please answer at once.  Don’t wait for a minute, and send me the
    money or write me one word ‘not.’  Remember this only that if you
    refuse me I will have nothing in common with you.

    “Your son,
    “——­”

There was another bit of testimony on the part of one Henry Dom, a baker, who for some strange reason came forward to identify him as some one he had known years before in Williamsburgh, which read: 

“I easily recognize them” (X——­ and his sister) “from their pictures in the newspapers.  I worked for X——­’s father, who was a baker in Williamsburgh, and frequently addressed letters that were written by X——­ Senior and his wife to Dr. Louise X——­ who was then studying medicine in Philadelphia.  X——­ was then a boy going to school, but working in his father’s bakery mornings and evenings.  He did not want to do that, moaned a great deal, and his parents humored him in his attitude.  He was very vain, liked to appear intellectual.  They kept saying to their friends that he should have a fine future.  Five years later, after I had left them once, I met the mother and she told me that X——­ was studying banking and getting along fine.”

Some seven years after the failure and trial by which he had so summarily been disposed of and after he had been released from prison, I was standing at a certain unimportant street corner in New York waiting for a car when I saw him.  He was passing in the opposite direction, not very briskly, and, as I saw, plainly meditatively.  He was not so well dressed.  The clothes he wore while good were somehow different, lacking in that exquisite something which had characterized him years before.  His hat—­well, it was a hat, not a Romanoff shako nor a handsome panama such as he had affected in the old days.  He looked tired, a little worn and dusty, I thought.

My first impulse was of course to hail him, my second not, since he had not seen me.  It might have been embarrassing, and at any rate he might not have even remembered me.  But as he walked I thought of the great house by the sea, the studio, the cars, the 40,000 roses, the crowds at his summer place, the receptions in town and out, Madame of the earrings (afterward married to a French nobleman), and then of the letter to his mother as a boy, the broken shoes in the winter time, his denial of his parents, the telephone message from the financial tiger.  “Vanity, vanity,” saith the preacher.  The shores of our social seas are strewn with pathetic wrecks, the whitening bone of half-sand-buried ships.