of their miseries, and worse torment from realization of his own contemptibility.  It really seemed as if all positions which might have been in some keeping with the man and his antecedents were absolutely out of his reach.  Not a night but he read the advertising columns until he was blind and dizzy.  Every morning he went to New York and hunted.  The first morning he had taken the train, he had actually to assure some of his watchful creditors that he was going to return.  Then all day he wandered about the streets, making one of long lines of applicants for the vacant positions.  One morning he found himself in the line with William Allbright.  He recognized unmistakably the meek, bent back of the old clerk three ahead of him in the line.  A book-keeper had been advertised for in a large wholesale house, and there were perhaps forty applicants all awaiting their turn.  His first impulse, when he caught sight of his old clerk, was to leave the line himself; then the nobility which was struggling for life within him asserted itself and made him ashamed of his shame.  He stood still with his head a little higher, and moved on with the slowly moving line of men which crawled towards the desk like a caterpillar.  He saw Allbright turn away rejected with a feeling of pity; the old man looked dejected.  Carroll reflected with a sensation of pride that at least he did not owe him.  He himself was rejected promptly after he had owned to his age.  The man four behind him was chosen.  He was a very young man, scarcely more than a boy, unless his looks belied him.  He was distinctly handsome, with the boy-doll style of beauty—­curly, dark hair, rosy cheeks, and a small, very carefully tended mustache.  He wore a very long and fashionable coat, and was evidently pleasantly conscious of its flop around his ankles.  His handsome face wore an expression of pert triumph as he passed on into the inner office....  Carroll, who had lingered with an idle curiosity to ascertain who was the successful applicant, heard a voice so near his ear that it whistled.  The voice was exceedingly bitter, even malignant.

“That’s the way it goes, these times; that’s the way it always goes,” said the voice.

Carroll turned and gazed at the speaker, a man probably older than himself; if not, he looked older, since his hair was quite white and his carriage not so good.

“The employers nowadays are a pack of fools, a pack of fools!” said the man.  His long, rather handsome face, a face which should have been mild in its natural state was twisted into a thousand sardonic wrinkles.  “A pack of fools!” he repeated.  “Here they’ll go and hire a little whippersnapper like that every time, instead of a man who has had experience and knows how to do the work, just because he’s young.  Young!  What’s that?  You’d think what they wanted was a man to keep their books straight.  I can keep books if I do say so, and that young snip can’t.  Lord!  He was in Avin & Mann’s