Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/262

246 sleep upon. But the stern necessity which hung over her with its iron hand was this:—

Her weekly rent became due on each Monday, and if not paid on that night, the next morning would see her inexorably turned out of her only home, and deprived of her only means of sustaining life.

She was pleased at my attention to her sad tale, and, with a little encouragement, mentioned some of the experience she had had in her painful vocation.

"At this moment," she said, "there is lying on a rug in the back kitchen a young man, who has tasted nothing during the last two days but water from the pump on the opposite side of the street. He appears," she said, "to have been in better circumstances in other times."

It was now two o'clock in the morning, in the midst of a dense fog. I inquired whether it would be possible at this hour to get some soup or meat, or anything to sustain life. I went down into the close unventilated room, and beheld, stretched on a kind of thing like a couple of sacks, a pale, emaciated man, apparently about two or three and thirty years of age. I desired him to call on me the next morning; and, leaving my address with his landlady, left also a small sum of money to procure for him, if possible, present necessaries.

The next morning this half-starved man called at my house, in garments scarcely covering him. I inquired into his history, and he told me one probably as fabulous as that with which he afterwards deluded me, during my own short acquaintance with him.

I supplied him with a few clothes, shoes, and other things, just to replace the worn-out rags in which I had found him, and desired him in a day or two, when he got them into a