all the world's affairs except the subject in hand.

"Do you know when he will be back?"

"Ten o'clock."

The visitor repeated the hour murmurously and looked something dismayed.
He tarried.

"Hem!--I will leave my card, if you please."

The clerk shoved a little box of cards toward him, from which a pencil
dangled by a string. The penniless wrote his name and handed it in. Then
he moved away, went down the tortuous granite stair, and waited in the
obscurity of the dimly lighted porch below. The card was to meet the
contingency of the Doctor's coming in by some other entrance. He would
watch for him here.

By and by--he was very weary--he sat down on the stairs. But a porter,
with a huge trunk on his back, told him very distinctly that he was in
the way there, and he rose and stood aside. Soon he looked for another
resting-place. He must get off of his feet somewhere, if only for a few
moments. He moved back into the deep gloom of the stair-way shadow, and
sank down upon the pavement. In a moment he was fast asleep.

He dreamed that he, too, was dining out. Laughter and merry-making were
on every side. The dishes of steaming viands were grotesque in bulk.
There were mountains of fruit and torrents of wine. Strange people of no
identity spoke in senseless vaporings that passed for side-splitting
wit, and friends whom he had not seen since childhood appeared in
ludicrously altered forms and announced impossible events. Every one ate
like a Cossack. One of the party, champing like a boar, pushed him
angrily, and when he, eating like the rest, would have turned fiercely
on the aggressor, he awoke.

A man standing over him struck him smartly with his foot.

"Get up out o' this! Get up! get up!"

The sleeper bounded to his feet. The man who had waked him grasped him
by the lapel of his coat.

"What do you mean?" exclaimed the awakened man, throwing the other off
violently.

"I'll show you!" replied the other, returning with a rush; but he was
thrown off again, this time with a blow of the fist.

"You scoundrel!" cried the penniless man, in a rage; "if you touch me
again I'll kill you!"

They leaped together. The one who had proposed to show what he meant was
knocked flat upon the stones. The crowd that had run into the porch made
room for him to fall. A leather helmet rolled from his head, and the
silver crescent of the police flashed on his breast. The police were not
uniformed in those days.

But he is