One stern hope—­it almost seemed a forlorn one—­now possessed me to the exclusion of all else; one prayer trembled on my quivering lips—­that I might reach my destination, if only to tell my story and drop dead a moment after.

Yet I think, in spite of this resolve—­this prayer—­that, had a friendly door been opened on the way, an area even emitting light and warmth, I should have instinctively turned aside and, at any risk, pleaded for shelter, both from storm and foeman.

In those days that seem far back in the march of luxury, because of the vast impetus of human momentum, stores were closed early, and the primitive family tea-table still existed which marked the assemblage of the household around the evening lamp and hearth.

I remember the closed, inhospitable look of the houses past which I sped—­the solid wooden shutters, then universal, which closed from the wayfarer every evidence of internal life, and the cold sheen of the icy-white marble steps, made visible by dim lamp-light.

I gained a street-corner not very far, as it seemed to me, from my place of destination.  Yet, until I glanced across the way, I was uncertain, and, but for the friendly refuge this opportunity presented, I think I must have faltered and perhaps fallen and frozen to death on the road-side.

To my bewildered and disordered brain, Aladdin’s palace seemed suddenly to rise before me in that wilderness of sealed houses and uninhabited streets; for, as I have said before, the very dogs had crept away that night into secure corners, and not even a pariah chimney-sweep, with his dingy blanket drawn close around him, nodded and dozed by a watch-box or slept on a door-step.

I crept across the space that divided me from this cynosure of warmth and luxury, as a poor, draggled moth might do, to bask in the revivifying light of an astral lamp, attracted beyond my power to resist, to pause before the resplendent window, rich in green and purple and amber rotund vases, whose transparent contents were set forth and revealed by fiery jets of gas, toward which I feebly stretched my half-frozen fingers.

There was a splendid vision, also, of goldfish, in glass globes, jars of leaden rock-work, baskets of waxen fruits and flowers, crystal bottles containing rose and amber essences; but, above all, there was light—­there was heat.

With one greedy, insatiate gaze my eyes swept in the details of this mimic Eden, and, in another moment, my hand turned the knob of the ground-glass door near the window, and I found myself in paradise!

Rest, shelter, heat—­these must I have or perish, and, but for the timely refuge of this thrice-blessed apothecary’s shop, I might have left this retrospect unwritten!

I staggered to a chair, and seated myself, unbidden, by the almost red-hot stove, and cowered above it for a time, oblivions of all else.

Then I looked timidly around me.