It was at this period of his career that Harlson was in closest sympathy with the sad-eyed Hindoo king.  He was not doing anything out of the way; he was working hard, with clean ambitions, yet he was hungry.  He could not understand it.  No doubt an empty stomach inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws.  There comes with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason, and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but which is recklessly acute.

“I want to do things, I want to help others—­I don’t know why, but I do—­I have ambitions, but I try to make them good.  I am doing the best I can with the brains I have.  I get up in the morning from the office floor and do my utmost all day, and try to do better when I get out, but nothing helps me!  Where is the God who, it is said, at worst, helps those who help themselves.

  “’You say that we have a meaning;
  So has dung, and its meaning is flowers.’

“The Hindoo king must be right.  I am, we all are but like horses, or trees, or mushrooms; and it is only some sort of accident which makes each thing with life successful or unsuccessful, happy or unhappy, as the case may be.”

So, at this time, Grant Harlson reasoned, blindly, yet in his heart there was something which protested against his own deductions and kept him in the path which was straightforward, and from staking all the future on the morrow.  So drifted away the days, and this strong-limbed young fellow became hungrier and hungrier, and more shiny at knees and elbows, and more lapsided of foot-gear, and more thoroughly puzzled at, and disgusted with, the city world.

Sometimes the young man would resolve that in the morning he would abandon all his plans, and seek the country again, and there, where he could hold his own and more, live and die apart from all the feverishness and chances of another way of living.  And he would awake and sniff in the morning air, and say to himself that he was a cur last night, and that he would stay and hold his own, and, in the end, win somehow.  The bulldog strain asserted itself, and he was his own again.  At night, after a fruitless day, he might become again depressed, but the morning restrung the bow.  Sometimes—­these were his weaker days—­he would abandon all effort, and seek the free public library, and there plunge into books and find, for the passing time, forgetfulness.  These were his only draughts of absolute nepenthe, for at night he dreamed of the yesterday or of the morrow, and it marred his rest.  The library gave him, for the time, another world, though it had harsh suggestions.  He would stop his reading to wonder how Chatterton felt when starving, or if Hood had as miserable a time of it as alleged, or if Goldsmith was jolly when, penniless, he argued his way through Europe, or if even Shakespeare went without a meal.  But the library, on the whole, was a solace and a tonic.  It rested him, since it made him, for a time, forget.