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.