How can we strive to win a
crown we have no longer any desire to wear? Now I desire other crowns
and at times I wear them, if only for a little while. My spirit grows
and grows. It is dragging at its strings.
What am I to look at? A small, white-haired man with a thin and rather
plaintive face in which are set two large, dark eyes that continually
seem to soften and develop. That is my picture. And what am I in the
world? I will tell you. On certain days of the week I employ myself in
editing a trade journal that has to do with haberdashery. On another
day I act as auctioneer to a firm which imports and sells cheap Italian
statuary; modern, very modern copies of the antique, florid marble
vases, and so forth. Some of you who read may have passed such marts
in different parts of the city, or even have dropped in and purchased a
bust or a tazza for a surprisingly small sum. Perhaps I knocked it
down to you, only too pleased to find a _bona fide_ bidder amongst my
company.
As for the rest of my time--well, I employ it in doing what good I
can among the poor and those who need comfort or who are bereaved,
especially among those who are bereaved, for to such I am sometimes able
to bring the breath of hope that blows from another shore.
Occasionally also I amuse myself in my own fashion. Thus sure knowledge
has come to me about certain epochs in the past in which I lived in
other shapes, and I study those epochs, hoping that one day I may find
time to write of them and of the parts I played in them.
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