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188 the most gigantic and the most savage-looking. I now came also to find the British and the Italian uniforms rather attractive, but liked the French and Swiss no better than before. In this later lengthy sojourn, I did not once seek a beau, and had only feeble desires to do so, whereas twelve years before I had a fierce, irresistible, obsession to be with them as much as possible. But most of all, I was restrained by the presence of my employer, who left me no good opportunity to seek other company.

After holding my position as private secretary during my middle twenties for over two years, I was compelled to resign because a tradesman's driver who frequently delivered goods at the house of my employer chanced to identify me while two ruffians were demanding blackmail on the Bowery. I was denounced to the truckdriver .as a. Several years afterward I learned that knowledge of the incident probably never reached my employer.

At this point in my life I wrote the present autobiography down to the year arrived at (1899), having previously kept copious diaries.

The scene of the last six years of my open career as a fairie, still to be described, lay in the neighborhood of—and in large part on—the military reservations in the suburbs. Providence granted me the fulfillment of a fond dream of years before—to be a soldiers' mignon. I now decided to devote exclusively to young Mars the remainder of my youth—for with me the period of youth continued abnormally long, at least until my early thirties.