a day besides, though suitable enough to the state of my finances, agreed poorly with my stomach.  The restaurant was a place I had often visited experimentally, to taste the life of students then more unfortunate than myself; and I had never in those days entered it without disgust, or left it without nausea.  It was strange to find myself sitting down with avidity, rising up with satisfaction, and counting the hours that divided me from my return to such a table.  But hunger is a great magician; and so soon as I had spent my ready cash, and could no longer fill up on bowls of chocolate or hunks of bread, I must depend entirely on that cabman’s eating-house, and upon certain rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls.  Dijon (for instance) might get paid for some of his pot-boiling work, or else an old friend would pass through Paris; and then I would be entertained to a meal after my own soul, and contract a Latin Quarter loan, which would keep me in tobacco and my morning coffee for a fortnight.  It might be thought the latter would appear the more important.  It might be supposed that a life, led so near the confines of actual famine, should have dulled the nicety of my palate.  On the contrary, the poorer a man’s diet, the more sharply is he set on dainties.  The last of my ready cash, about thirty francs, was deliberately squandered on a single dinner; and a great part of my time when I was alone was passed upon the details of imaginary feasts.

One gleam of hope visited me—­an order for a bust from a rich Southerner.  He was free-handed, jolly of speech, merry of countenance; kept me in good humour through the sittings, and when they were over, carried me off with him to dinner and the sights of Paris.  I ate well; I laid on flesh; by all accounts, I made a favourable likeness of the being, and I confess I thought my future was assured.  But when the bust was done, and I had despatched it across the Atlantic, I could never so much as learn of its arrival.  The blow felled me; I should have lain down and tried no stroke to right myself, had not the honour of my country been involved.  For Dijon improved the opportunity in the European style; informing me (for the first time) of the manners of America:  how it was a den of banditti without the smallest rudiment of law or order, and debts could be there only collected with a shotgun.  “The whole world knows it,” he would say; “you are alone, mon petit Loudon, you are alone to be in ignorance of these facts.  The judges of the Supreme Court fought but the other day with stilettos on the bench at Cincinnati.  You should read the little book of one of my friends:  Le Touriste dans le Far-West; you will see it all there in good French.”  At last, incensed by days of such discussion, I undertook to prove to him the contrary, and put the affair in the hands of my late father’s lawyer.  From him I had the gratification of hearing, after a due interval, that my debtor was dead of the yellow fever in Key West, and had left his affairs in some confusion.  I suppress his name; for though he treated me with cruel nonchalance, it is probable he meant to deal fairly in the end.