to earn a little more money than his
actual needs demanded, and thus was enabled to see something of foreign
countries. Naturally a man of independent and rather scornful outlook,
he had suffered much from defeated ambition, from disillusions of many
kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time
of which I am speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind
and temper so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with
him, one did not know but that he led a calm, contented life. Only after
several years of friendship was I able to form a just idea of what the
man had gone through, or of his actual existence. Little by little
Ryecroft had subdued himself to a modestly industrious routine. He did a
great deal of mere hack-work; he reviewed, he translated, he wrote
articles; at long intervals a volume appeared under his name. There were
times, I have no doubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he
suffered in health, and probably as much from moral as from physical over-
strain; but, on the whole, he earned his living very much as other men
do, taking the day's toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling
over it.

Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious and poor.
In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies, and
evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future. The thought of
dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps the only boast I
at any time heard from his lips was that he had never incurred debt. It
was a bitter thought that, after so long and hard a struggle with
unkindly circumstance, he might end his life as one of the defeated.

A happier lot was in store for him. At the age of fifty, just when his
health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement, Ryecroft had
the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly released from toil, and to
enter upon a period of such tranquillity of mind and condition as he had
never dared to hope. On the death of