A beggar caught my eye whom I used to see on my way to school every morning, and with the passing of the days his face became familiar to me. His appearance showed that he was a man once honored among his people and brought low. After a long struggle with my pride I went up to him one day and asked him the story of his life; whereupon he looked at me a long while, then stared into the far horizon as if drawing his story from the piled-up clouds, then brought his gaze back to me and began to tell the strangest story I have ever heard. He said:

My story began the day I was born to wealthy parents. I grew up and was reared in a house where everyone lived with a single hope in life — and that hope was I. God had granted my parents no child but me, so I was the apple of their eyes, and my father waited with the greatest impatience for the day he would see me grown to full manhood. But I was the very opposite of them: my father had lived and built himself a position and gathered money, and he wanted me to be like him, but I thought of nothing but amusement.

My father wanted to give me a higher education, because in his poverty he had never been able to satisfy his own desire for learning; but I would pretend to go to school, and from the moment I left the house I would make for the home of some bad companion or a seat in a café. So I passed my days, and neither a relative's advice nor a father's restraint did me any good; rather I took to frequenting certain taverns and dance halls, where I spent my nights in the embrace of vice.

My father lost all hope in me, and so at last he decided to marry me off, that I might find the straight path; but I deserted the house after my wedding party and lived in a hotel for years. Meanwhile my wife had given birth to a child created to live in perpetual misery. After his

birth my father died, leaving me his whole inheritance — for death overtook him before he could transfer his fortune to the child — and I was utterly brutish when I hurried to the lawyer and took my share of an inheritance never created for the likes of me. I squandered that fortune in a matter of days on a dancing girl whose wantonness had bewitched me, and after the money was gone

the calamities came upon me one after another: I gambled and lost, I drank and got drunk..

As for my son, he studied on the money my mother and my wife had saved, and he was always first in his class. The years passed, and then my son won a competition to go to Europe. He went, and there he was the finest example of the energetic young man devoted to his studies and nothing more; he paid no heed to amusement, for he had had misery enough.

The son came back from the lands of the West with a high diploma in his hand and obtained a respectable post, and with his return

the sufferings of the mother and the grandmother came to an end, for he

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