1. Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr. I am the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated and of sound health — with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not — I sometimes think that I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for then the contrast between my outer and my inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort I might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels...

The cat was looking at the glow of the city. It always stood in the sky with an orange-red calmly restless spot. A vague rumble, barely coming from there, disturbed the cat, there was an unknown constant danger from the city, he knew it when in hungry winters he went to the outskirts of the railways and the highway, but he had never crossed the forest and had never gone further places where his instinct stopped him. He returned to the hungry forest, scoured through the swamps in the thickets, ran...