The Million Pound Bank Note

The first-person narrator of the story Henry Adams age twenty-seven is a mining-broker's clerk in San Francisco. He says at the outset that he intends to make a fortune although he has nothing but his wits and a clean reputation. While sailing one afternoon he is carried out to sea and eventually rescued by a small brig bound for London. When he arrives in London he has only a dollar to his name and is soon without shelter and food. Walking around Portland Place Henry yearns for a pear that a child has tossed into the gutter. He walks back and forth by the pear waiting for other people to be out of sight.