"Monsieur Pisgah," he said, "you can have nothing to eat here, until you
pay a part of your bill with me; I am a poor man, sir, and have
children."
Pisgah kept up the street with heavy forebodings, and turned into the
place of a clothes-merchant, to whom his face had long been familiar.
When he emerged, his handsome habits, the gift of Madame Francine, hung
in the clothes-dealer's window, and Mr. Pisgah, wearing a common blouse,
a cap, and coarse hide shoes, repaired to the nearest wine-shop, and
drank a dead man's portion of absinthe at the zinc counter. Then he
returned to his own hotel, but as he reached to the rack for his key,
the landlady laid her hand upon it and shook her head.
"You are properly dressed, Monsieur Pisgah," she said; "those who have
no money should work; you cannot sleep in twenty-six to night, sir; I
have shut up the chamber, and seized the little rubbish which you left."
Pisgah was homeless--a vagabond, an outcast. He walked unsteadily along
the street in the pleasant evening, and the film of tears that shut the
world from his eyes was peopled with far-off and familiar scenes.
He saw his father's wide acres, with the sunset gilding the fleeces of
his sheep and crowning with fire the stacks of grain and the vanes upon
his granges.
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