"Life is uncertain. I'll drink now and—"
"This way!" The policeman now spoke in his regular voice.
He led the thirsty out of the room by another door which led into still another room used for storing the heavy circus impedimenta.
"Do you see?" asked H. R., sweetly, to the reporters and the students of sociology from the magazines. "Do you?"
"Mr. Rutgers, Columbus and his egg had nothing on you," said the earnest young theorist from the Evening Post.
The others were busily turning out literature.
"It won't cheat 'em out of a meal," H. R. whispered to young Mr. Lubin from the Onward. "But they don't eat with the others."
That is how H. R. kept his promise to the business men of New York. He had circumvented fraud, which is the chief aim of modern charity. Also he had discouraged the formation of a professional pauper class—the one danger against which all commonwealths must guard.
"I'd like to know what you are going to do with the culls," the Sun man asked H. R. He had of late been trying to elevate the tone of the magazines with real fiction; which they refused to print.
"Those who fell through thirst will be fed later," H. R. answered.