Worrying over pecuniary affairs gradually sapped my mind. To lose one's eyes or all one's relations, or to be bitten by a mad dog, will not unhinge the brain so completely as pecuniary anxiety. My paragraphs, spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my post on the Times. I became the collector on commission of certain rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicago tenements should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none; therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in Nathan's service.
One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you. At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is well."
In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English traveller—"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something—who had a long, silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.
That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never hit a clam?" asked he.
"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.
"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about in livery-rigs everywhere—sure sign of prosperity."
"Your people are not out," I said.
"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."
"They can't get work," said I.
"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: that I know" said the old man.