’I may ask, at least, why aren’t you looked after?  Why don’t you get into some hospital?’ I said.

‘Hospital!’ cried the sick man, and then he too burst out into that furious laugh, the most awful sound I ever had heard.  Some of the passers-by stopped to hear what the joke was, and surrounded me with once more a circle of mockers.

’Hospitals! perhaps you would like a whole Red Cross Society, with ambulances and all arranged?’ cried one.  ‘Or the Misericordia!’ shouted another.  I sprang up to my feet, crying, ‘Why not?’ with an impulse of rage which gave me strength.  Was I never to meet with anything but this fiendish laughter?  ‘There’s some authority, I suppose,’ I cried in my fury.  ‘It is not the rabble that is the only master here, I hope.’  But nobody took the least trouble to hear what I had to say for myself.  The last speaker struck me on the mouth, and called me an accursed fool for talking of what I did not understand; and finally they all swept on and passed away.

I had been, as I thought, severely injured when I dragged myself into that corner to save myself from the crowd; but I sprang up now as if nothing had happened to me.  My wounds had disappeared; my bruises were gone.  I was as I had been when I dropped, giddy and amazed, upon the same pavement, how long—­an hour?—­before?  It might have been an hour, it might have been a year, I cannot tell.  The light was the same as ever, the thunderous atmosphere unchanged.  Day, if it was day, had made no progress; night, if it was evening, had come no nearer,—­all was the same.

As I went on again presently, with a vexed and angry spirit, regarding on every side around me the endless surging of the crowd, and feeling a loneliness, a sense of total abandonment and solitude, which I cannot describe, there came up to me a man of remarkable appearance.  That he was a person of importance, of great knowledge and information, could not be doubted.  He was very pale, and of a worn but commanding aspect.  The lines of his face were deeply drawn; his eyes were sunk under high arched brows, from which they looked out as from caves, full of a fiery impatient light.  His thin lips were never quite without a smile; but it was not a smile in which any pleasure was.  He walked slowly, not hurrying, like most of the passengers.  He had a reflective look, as if pondering many things.  He came up to me suddenly, without introduction or preliminary, and took me by the arm.  ’What object had you in talking of these antiquated institutions?’ he said.  And I saw in his mind the gleam of the thought, which seemed to be the first with all, that I was a fool, and that it was the natural thing to wish me harm, just as in the earth above it was the natural thing, professed at least, to wish well,—­to say, Good-morning, good-day, by habit and without thought.  In this strange country the stranger was received with a curse, and it woke an answer not unlike the hasty ‘Curse you, then, also!’ which seemed to come without any will of mine through my mind.  But this provoked only a smile from my new friend.  He took no notice.  He was disposed to examine me, to find some amusement perhaps—­how could I tell?—­in what I might say.