atables, his eyes gleamed with the
desire of a famished animal. He staggered across the threshold, but
was stopped by the door-keeper. "Ticket," said the man. The outcast
did not understand, he could see nothing but the food within. A
policeman stepped forward and laid his hand on his arm.

"This is no place for you," he said roughly. "You have no money, move
on!"

"He looks hungry, wait!" said a little girl, who was pinning some
flowers on the lapel of a young minister's coat, and she ran to a
table and brought a piece of bread to the starving man. He hugged it
in his arms, and tottered out into the night, chuckling to himself in
joy. A square where trees and flowers grew was before him. He entered
it, and sank on to a bench near a fountain. He looked at the bread,
and a savage content captured his features. He was about to break it
when a man arose from a seat across a walk, and came and sat down
beside him, eyeing the food covetously. He touched the thin hand that
held it, and the two men looked into each other's eyes.

"I am starving," said the breadless one. "I have no means. I belong to
a family who have descended from kings; I cannot beg. I thought you
looked as if you did not want it. I am dying."

The other clutched the food tightly in both his hands for an instant.
A look of ferocious desire wrung his face, and he raised it to his
lips. Then a divine smile dawned in his eyes, and he proffered it to
the other. The man took it eagerly, and slipped into the darkness,
that he might eat it unseen. As he turned away the head of the giver
sank slowly to his breast.

Brightly lighted streets stretched away in several directions. A
procession of men and women bearing banners and beating drums and
tambourines passed along, singing hymns, and pausing now and then to
kneel on the cobblestones to pray or to urge the little clusters of
idlers to join them in their march to safety. Above the wondrous stars
and moon were shining as they had shone at the dawn of eternal
thought. They shone on the Vatican at Rome, the imperial cradle of
saints; on the comfortable homes of ministers in the church; on the
"palaces" of gentle-blooded bishops; on assemblages of men who were
wrangling over creeds; on gatherings where earnest searchers after
truth were being tried for heresy; on prisons where inmates of dark,
silent cells were praying for a gleam of light, for but the voice of
an insect to keep madness from their tortured brain