e giggled at and nicknamed Puss-in-Boots by
frisky misses; on to the days of so many crowns and so many victories,
and so many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many thousand war-hoofs
trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty miles in front of
the grand army? To go back, to give up, to proclaim myself a failure, an
ambitious failure, first a rocket, then a stick! I, Loudon Dodd, who
had refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been advertised in the
Saint Joseph _Sunday Herald_ as a patriot and an artist, to be returned
upon my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the circuit of my
father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep offices! No, by
Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and the two who had that
day flouted me should live to envy my success, or to weep tears of
unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.

Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to
a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-house stood, at the
tail of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud,
offering (to fancy) a face of ambiguous invitation. I might be received,
I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps
this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead,
with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was
policy; but I had already, in the course of that one morning, endured
too many affronts, and I felt I could rather starve than face another. I
had courage and to spare for the future, none left for that day; courage
for the main campaign, but not a spark of it for that preliminary
skirmish of the cabman's restaurant. I continued accordingly to sit
upon my bench, not far from the ashes of Napoleon, now drowsy, now
light-headed, now in complete mental obstruction, or only conscious
of an animal pleasure in quiescence; and now thinking, planning, and
remembering with unexampled clearness, telling myself tales of sudden
wealth, and gustfully ordering and greedily consuming imaginary meals:
in the course of which I must have dropped asleep.

It was towards dark that I was suddenly recalled to famine by a cold
souse of rain, and sprang shivering to my feet. For a moment I stood
bewildered: the whole train of my reasoning and dreaming passed afresh
through my mind; I was again tempted, drawn as if with cords, by
the image of the cabman's eating-house, and again recoiled from the
possib