vities of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion
is heard in the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced
its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival;
he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle
great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to
the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher
handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a
stormy winter night; and the trousers,--some one suggests that they are
inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius
never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey,
led on by the current of his own thoughts,--though he was always too
courteous to absorb the entire conversation,--talks on "till it is far
into the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about
separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of
civilization, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of
the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the specials, he
could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his
own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either
couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having
taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme
unpleasantness of such a couch?"

"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore,
he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing
on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should
get a penny and go home,--a proposal which he subjected to some
philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he
had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even whether he had
eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to
be refreshed was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the
hard he could not eat. Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of
that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it
might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to
be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops! non