ently some one else
rapped. "It is Desor," said the Count; "I know his knock; let him in."
Desor was a Swiss, a scientific man, who lodged in the adjacent house.
Gurowski apparently was involved in a dispute with him also, which he
immediately took up, on some question of natural history. The Swiss,
however, did not seem to care to contest the point, whatever it was, and
soon went away. On his departure Gurowski again began his mediaeval
argument; but I positively refused to stay unless he put on his clothes.
He reluctantly complied, and went into his bedroom, while I took up a
book. Every now and then, however, he would sally out to argue some
fresh point which had suggested itself to him; and his toilet was not
fairly completed till, at the end of the third hour, the announcement of
dinner put an end to the discussion.

Disappointed in his hopes of getting employment as a lecturer or
teacher, on which he had relied for subsistence, Gurowski felt himself
growing poorer and poorer as the little stock of money he had brought
from Europe wasted away. The discomforts of poverty did not tend to
sweeten his temper nor to abate his savage independence. He grew prouder
and fiercer as he grew poorer. He was very economical, and indulged in
no luxuries except cigars, of which, however, he was not a great
consumer, seldom smoking more than three or four a day. But with all his
care, his money was at length exhausted, his last dollar gone. He had
expected remittances from Poland, which did not come; and he now learned
that, from some cause which I have forgotten, nothing would be sent him
for that year at least. He used to tell me from day to day of the
progress of his "decline and fall," as he called it, remarking
occasionally that, when the worst came to the worst, he could turn
himself into an Irishman and work for his living. I paid little
attention to this talk, for really the idea of Gurowski and manual labor
was so ridiculously incongruous that I could not form any definite
conception of it. But he was more in earnest than I supposed.

Going one day at my usual hour to his lodgings, I found him absent. I
called again in the course of the day, but he was still not at home, and
the people of the house informed me that he had been absent since early
morning. The next day it was the same. On the third day I lay in wait
for him at evening at his lodgings, to which he came about dark, in a
most forlorn condition, with his hands