ancient Egyptians? What to us are their
words or their thoughts? Are we pauper Arabs, without a house of our
own, that, with the mummies, we must turn squatters among the dust of
the Catacombs?"

"Pharaoh's poorest brick-maker lies proudlier in his rags than the
Emperor of all the Russias in his hollands," oracularly said the
stranger; "for death, though in a worm, is majestic; while life, though
in a king, is contemptible. So talk not against mummies. It is a part of
my mission to teach mankind a due reverence for mummies."

Fortunately, to arrest these incoherencies, or rather, to vary them, a
haggard, inspired-looking man now approached--a crazy beggar, asking
alms under the form of peddling a rhapsodical tract, composed by
himself, and setting forth his claims to some rhapsodical apostleship.
Though ragged and dirty, there was about him no touch of vulgarity; for,
by nature, his manner was not unrefined, his frame slender, and appeared
the more so from the broad, untanned frontlet of his brow, tangled over
with a disheveled mass of raven curls, throwing a still deeper tinge
upon a complexion like that of a shriveled berry. Nothing could exceed
his look of picturesque Italian ruin and dethronement, heightened by
what seemed just one glimmering peep of reason, insufficient to do him
any lasting good, but enough, perhaps, to suggest a torment of latent
doubts at times, whether his addled dream of glory were true.

Accepting the tract offered him, the cosmopolitan glanced over it, and,
seeming to see just what it was, closed it, put it in his pocket, eyed
the man a moment, then, leaning over and presenting him with a shilling,
said to him, in tones kind and considerate: "I am sorry, my friend, that
I happen to be engaged just now; but, having purchased your work, I
promise myself much satisfaction in its perusal at my earliest leisure."

In his tattered, single-breasted frock-coat, buttoned meagerly up to his
chin, the shutter-brain made him a bow, which, for courtesy, would not
have misbecome a viscount, then turned with silent appeal to the
stranger. But the stranger sat more like a cold prism than ever, while
an expression of keen Yankee cuteness, now replacing his former mystical
one, lent added icicles to his aspect. His whole air said: "Nothing
from me." The repulsed petitioner threw a look full of resentful pride
and cracked disdain upon him, and went his way.

"Come, now," said the cosmopolitan, a little re