ps of Burgundy: perhaps, more properly, of famine
and repletion.

I remember clearly, at least, the shame, the despair, of the next
morning, when I reviewed what I had done, and how I had swindled the
poor honest porter: and, as if that were not enough, fairly burnt my
ships, and brought bankruptcy home to that last refuge, my garret. The
porter would expect his money; I could not pay him; here was scandal in
the house; and I knew right well the cause of scandal would have to
pack. "What do you mean by calling my honesty in question?" I had cried
the day before, turning upon Myner. Ah, that day before! the day before
Waterloo, the day before the Flood; the day before I had sold the roof
over my head, my future, and my self-respect, for a dinner at the Cafe
Cluny!

In the midst of these lamentations the famous registered letter came to
my door, with healing under its seal. It bore the postmark of San
Francisco, where Pinkerton was already struggling to the neck in
multifarious affairs; it renewed the offer of an allowance, which his
improved estate permitted him to announce at the figure of two hundred
francs a month; and in case I was in some immediate pinch, it enclosed
an introductory draft for forty dollars. There are a thousand excellent
reasons why a man, in this self-helpful epoch, should decline to be
dependent on another; but the most numerous and cogent considerations
all bow to a necessity as stern as mine; and the banks were scarce open
ere the draft was cashed.

It was early in December that I thus sold myself into slavery, and for
six months I dragged a slowly lengthening chain of gratitude and
uneasiness. At the cost of some debt I managed to excel myself and
eclipse the Genius of Muskegon, in a small but highly patriotic
"Standard Bearer" for the Salon; whither it was duly admitted, where it
stood the proper length of days entirely unremarked, and whence it came
back to me as patriotic as before. I threw my whole soul (as Pinkerton
would have phrased it) into clocks and candlesticks; the devil a
candlestick-maker would have anything to say to my designs. Even when
Dijon, with his infinite good-humour and infinite scorn for all such
journey-work, consented to peddle them in indiscriminately with his own,
the dealers still detected and rejected mine. Home they returned to me,
true as the Standard Bearer, who now, at the head of quite a regiment of
lesser idols, began to grow an eyesore in the scanty stud