Freckle "The whole world is in deep waters," said Pisgah, dismally. "So much the better for them; here goes for something stronger!" He repaired to the nearest drinking-saloon, and demanded a glass brimful of absinthe, at which all the garçons and patrons held up their hands while he drank it to the dregs.[Pg 64] [Pg 64] "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 Hôtel 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. The chasseurs in the mess-room were making merry after dinner with pipes and cards, and one of these, giving Pisgah a piece of bread and a tin basin of[Pg 65] strong soup, slapped him smartly upon the shoulder, and cried: [Pg 65] "My fine fellow! you have the stuff in you for a soldier." "I am just getting a soldier's stuff into me," responded Pisgah, antithetically. "Why do you go abroad, hungry, ill-dressed,
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