As I
listened, I could make their lives mine, I felt their rags on my back,
I walked with their gaping shoes on my feet; their cravings, their
needs, had all passed into my soul, or my soul had passed into theirs.
It was the dream of a waking man. I waxed hot with them over the
foreman's tyranny, or the bad customers that made them call again and
again for payment.
To come out of my own ways of life, to be another than myself through
a kind of intoxication of the intellectual faculties, and to play this
game at will, such was my recreation. Whence comes the gift? Is it a
kind of second sight? Is it one of those powers which when abused end
in madness? I have never tried to discover its source; I possess it, I
use it, that is all. But this it behooves you to know, that in those
days I began to resolve the heterogeneous mass known as the People
into its elements, and to evaluate its good and bad qualities. Even
then I realized the possibilities of my suburb, that hotbed of
revolution in which heroes, inventors, and practical men of science,
rogues and scoundrels, virtues and vices, were all packed together by
poverty, stifled by necessity, drowned in drink, and consumed by
ardent spirits.
You would not imagine how many adventures, how many tragedies, lie
buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and
beauty lurks there.
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