A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.

This man before me is a policeman.

Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city.  I will go to him for advice.

The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise—­and laughed at the ingenuous conclusion.  Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a “billy” are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.

It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a mistake of judgment, or meditate one.  Therefore he approached the guardian of the peace confidently.

This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity.  The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet were in his air.

“Excuse me, sir—­I want to ask you—­” began Isaac, after a proper obeisance.

“Move on, will yer!”

“But I wanted to ask you—­”

“Phwat are ye blockin’ up the road fur, young man?”

“I want you to help me!”

“The ——­ you do!” He looked about ferociously.  “Look here, sonny, if ye don’t move along, an’ have plenty of shtyle about it, I’ll help ye to the lock-up—­so help me—!”

Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with one swoop of his hands.  The consternation of his first broken ideal possessed his heart.  With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his ears.  He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that poisons country faith.  Take from the pavement enough dust to cover the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a week it will be dead with tetanus.  After this first encounter with the protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed with mud.  He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart.  Had he not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness of the first policeman whom he saw?  What other guide or protector was there left for him in the strange city?  The rebuff which he had received half annihilated his intelligence.

[Illustration:  “AM—­I—­IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR?  IS THIS YOUR LAW?”]

Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than the majority of us can take a trip to Japan.  Isaac hurried on.  Why did he leave home?  The fear of a great city is more teasing than the terror of a wilderness or of a desert.  There the trees or the rocks or the sand befriends you.  But in the city the penniless stranger has no part in people or home or doorsteps.  Every one’s heart is against him.  It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than barnacles upon a wharf pile.  Such