"Sacristie!" cried a man with mouth wide open, "that gentleman can drink
clear laudanum."
"I wish," thought Pisgah, with a pale face, "that it had been laudanum;
I should have been dead by this time and all over. Why don't I get the
_delirium tremens_? I should like to be crazy. Oh, ho, ho, ho!" he
continued, laughing wildly, "to be in a hospital--nurses, soft bed, good
food, pity--oh, ho! that would be a fate fit for an emperor."
Here his eye caught something across the way which riveted it, and he
took half a step forward, exultingly. A great _caserne_, or barrack,
adjoined the Hotel de Ville, and twice every day, after breakfast and
dinner, the soldiers within distributed the surplus of their rations to
mendicants without. The latter were already assembling--laborers in
neat, common clothing, with idlers and profligates not more forbidding,
while a soldier on guard directed them where to rest and in what order
or number to enter the building. Pisgah halted a moment with his heart
in his throat. But he was very hungry, and his silver was half gone
already; if he purchased a dinner, he might not be left with sufficient
to obtain a bed for the night.
"Great God!" he said aloud, lifting his clenched hands and swollen eyes
to the stars, "am I, then, among the very dogs, that I should beg the
crumbs of a common soldier?"
He took his place in the line, and when at length his turn was
announced, followed the rabble shamefacedly.
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