you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion
master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of
rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of
fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism--pouf! a snap of
the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of
life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe,
nor in a dead child. They never arrived. Nor did Cerberus. Now for
a really pretty problem--"

"But the local color?" I prodded him.

"That's right," he replied. "Keep me in the running. Well, I took my
handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color),
dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for
a box-car, and ran off the stuff. Of course I made it clever and
brilliant and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the
state and my social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to
dissatisfy the average citizen.

"From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was
particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good
people. It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it
costs the community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps
in jail, than to send them as guests, for like periods of time, to
the best hotel. And this I developed, giving the facts and figures,
the constable fees and the mileage, and the court and jail expenses.
Oh, it was convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly
humorous fashion which fetched the laugh and left the sting. The
main objection to the system, I contended, was the defraudment and
robbery of the tramp. The good money which the community paid out