A Social Meteor — page 133: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A SOCIAL METEOR. 123 mining to make the most of the goods the gods provided. He was a man who had knocked about a great deal and seen some fuvny sights, as he would tell you, with a merry twinkle in his eyes. ‘Two for- tunes had melted away in his hands, with noth- ing to show for them. Where they had gone, or who had been benefited by his loss, no one knew, as he apparently had no habits of dissipa- tion, being very moderate generally in his use of tobacco and liquor, and caring but little for the society of any women, excepting a few intimate friends. Once a year regularly, however, he dis- appeared from sight, quietly and always alone; but where he went or what he did, nobody could ever find out, though during the past twenty years more than one person had tried hard to dis- cover. He would return in about three months, attend to his business, resume his old pursuits, and never refer to his trips; to any one bold enough to ask, he would always reply that he had been “traveling.” Queer tales, concerning those mysterious absences of his, floated around once in a while, but as the narrators never got beyond “they say” or “I don’t know how true it is, but”—they were seldom given much credence. Eomicbooks.Go