h I labour. Camoens held out his hand for charity
in the streets of Lisbon. Tudesco stretches forth his in the
byways of the modern Babylon, but it is to give and not to
receive--lunches at 1 fr. 25, dinners at 1 fr. 75," and he offered
one of his bills to a passer-by, who strode on, hands in pockets,
without taking it.

Thereupon the Marquis Tudesco heaved a sigh and exclaimed:

"And yet I have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
masterpiece of the immortal Torquato Tasso! But the brutal-minded
booksellers scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean
the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the humiliation
inflicted on her nursling."

"And what has become of you all the time since we last saw you?"
asked the young man frankly.

"God only knows, and 'pon my word! I think He has forgotten."

Such was the Marquis Tudesco's oracular answer.

He tied up his bundle of papers in a cloth, and taking his pupil by
the arm, urged him in the direction of the _Rue Saint-Jacques_.

"See, my young friend," he said, "the dome of the Pantheon is
half hidden by the fog. The School of Salerno teaches that the
damp air of evening is inimical to the human stomach. There is
near by a decent establishment where we can converse as two
philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to
conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated
you in the Latin rudiments."

They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of
kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away. The room was
long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with
copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was
lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under
the gas-jets. At little tables of painted deal a number of men
were drinking; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats,
broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the rain, they sat and
smoked in silence. Before the door of the stove several pairs
of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of
steam curled up from the toes of the owners' boots. A heavy torpor
seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, impassive
faces.

While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old
acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about
him that filled him with a despairing melancholy--school ushers
railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering
contentedly t