call Alan Conrad, and what am I to the man who writes from Chicago, had been the paramount enigma of existence for him. Since he was now twenty-three, as nearly as he had been able to approximate it, and as distinct recollection of isolated, extraordinary events went back to the time when he was five, it was quite eighteen years since he had first noticed the question put to the people who had him in charge: "So this is little Alan Conrad. Who is he?" 

 Undoubtedly the question had been asked in his presence before; certainly it was asked many times afterwards; but it was since that day when, on his noticing the absence of a birthday of his own, they had told him he was five, that he connected the evasion of the answer with the difference between himself and the other children he saw, and particularly between himself and the boy and girl in the same house with him. When visitors came from somewhere far off, no one of them ever looked surprised at seeing the other children or asked about them. Always, when some one came, it was, "So this is little Jim!" and "This is Betty; she's more of a Welton every day!"  Then, each time with that change in the voice and in the look of the eyes and in the feel of the arms about him—for though Alan could not feel how the arms hugged Jim and Betty, he knew that for him it was quite different—"So this is Alan Conrad," or, "So this is the child!" or, "This, I suppose, is the boy I've heard about!" 

 However, there was a quite definite, if puzzling, advantage at times in being Alan Conrad. Following the arrival of certain letters, which were distinguished from most others arriving at the house by having no ink writing on the envelope but just a sort of purple or black printing like newspapers, Alan invariably received a dollar to spend just as he liked. To be sure, unless "papa" took him to town, there was nothing for him to spend it upon; so, likely enough, it went into the square iron bank, of which the key was lost; but quite often he did spend it according to plans agreed upon among all his friends and, in memory of these occasions and in anticipation of the next, "Alan's dollar" became a community institution among the children. 

 But exhilarating and wonderful as it was to be able of one's self to take three friends to the circus, or to be the purveyor of twenty whole packages—not sticks—of gum, yet the dollar really made only more plain the boy's difference. The regularity and certainty of its arrival as Alan's share of some larger sum of money which came to "papa" in the letter, never served to make the event ordinary or accepted. 

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