doubtful instances, as it would be to print a book or newspaper correctly before the proof-reader improved it by his emendations.”

With this he bade me “good-morning,” and, shaking hands, again he disappeared within. I walked on air that morning. All the encouragement I had ever felt was not a tenth of that which this seemingly abandoned Bohemian had voluntarily excited. Some one says that every man has the ashes of a poet in him. I am sure Tip McClosky, long wandering through this land, and now an exile in Mexico, has the ashes of a gentleman in him. What a pity that fortuitous circumstances, home influences, or an inherent will had not guided the warm instincts of his soul, and developed them into something worthier; how sad to contemplate a man wrecked on the waste waters of dissolution, from a mere lack of something to change his course!

But I am forgeting Van Dusen. Before I left New York I learned from Tip that Posie had been discharged. The story was a brief one. Van Dusen, Tip, and Cap De Costa, another telegraphic knight, had been up into Westchester County the week before to a ball. Van Dusen went to play the violin, on which he performed quite creditably, “though he got a message going to 14 Milk Street as 1470 K Street,” said Tip, as he related the details. “Posie fiddled,” said Tip, “as long as he could, and when he had become not only too full for utterance, but too full to scrape the strings, the people piled us into the wagon and started us home. It was awfully dark, and most of us were asleep for a very long time; but Posie woke up at length and wanted me to stop the horse; said he thought his Cremona was knocking around in the bottom of the wagon. So I reigned in the steed, and Posie got out to make an examination. I went right to sleep, and I guess Cap wasn’t awake at all. Anyway, we fetched up at the stable next morning, and Posie wasn’t in. He says now that I drove off and left him in the woods twelve miles from Harlem. He was five days footing it into New York, and when he got here J. C. H. had his paper sealed, signed, and ready for delivery.”

I wasn’t as sorry as I ought to have been. I didn’t like Van Dusen particularly. Perhaps I was prejudiced by Tip, whom I had once heard tell Posie, “Yes, you are a big operator—let you tell it.”

Last summer I embarked for Boston by the Shore Line train, leaving Forty-second Street at nine P. M. There were not many in the cars—a young operator from Watertown, N. Y., going to New London to work for the opposition; a couple of dry goods drummers, one or two miscellaneous entities, and myself. Just as the train was starting, a chap whom I at once recognized as Van Dusen entered the car. He was redolent of vinous compounds, and before we had fairly steamed into Harlem he had edged himself into the conversation proceeding between the two drummers. One of them had said something about his “circuit,” and that was sufficient to set Van Dusen’s tongue to running like mad. He worked the first wire that was ever worked from New Orleans to New York, he did; he took the first message that was ever sent across the plains—that’s what kind of a man he was. But his auditors were not so much interested in telegraphics as they might have been, and they incontinently snubbed the man of dots and dashes, and he was obliged at last to address his conversation to the boy. After awhile he got a railroad flask, and he offered some of it to everybody. There were no takers except himself. He had talked shop just enough to raise the curiosity of the youngster from Watertown, and the lad came over and sat with him on the seat behind me. I couldn’t help hearing much of what was said, and I thanked my stars when I began to feel drowsy just after leaving New Haven. The train, however, was a lightning express, and the abrupt curves and uneven track swayed the smoking car, and I woke up at intervals of ten or fifteen minutes, I should judge. By some singular fatality my waking moments seemed to come just as Van Dusen was beginning to relate the history of some new adventure. As nearly as I can recall it, the panorama shifted after this manner:

“Sorry you won’t take a drink, young fellow. The whisky in this bottle is fourteen years old. I want to give you a little of my experience; some heavy work I did in Cincinnati. I took fourteen thousand words of press—”

Then I fell asleep and woke up to this refrain: