“True,” returned the other. “Granted, but not precisely in the same degree as the one he had been following. He had known what a wayward life was in the country, but the town loafer’s life was new to him, and brought fresh charms—yes, charms, I will call them. There is positively a fascinating spell in a life of monetary casualty which is a mystery to those who are well provided for in life. Even the extreme of misery does not break the spell. Sadness oftentimes twines itself around the strings of the heart, while it releases and softens them.
“I knew a corner in a tap-room of a public-house resorted to by cadgers which was called the dead man’s corner, because numbers of decayed beggars had made it their sleeping place, and in that spot one had breathed his last. The seat was frequently at a premium among aged beggars.”
“Ah, I say, draw it mild, old man,” said several voices.
“It’s a fact,” returned the man in the corner.
No two specimen of the human species could form a stranger contrast than the gipsy and the man in the corner, or the “Croaker,” as the former designated him.
The gipsy was full of robust health, of life, and animation.
The “Croaker” resembled more the skeleton of a murdered man than a living subject.
The attenuation of his figure conveyed to the mind the horrible idea of a man just terminating his life under a sentence of starvation.
His eyes resembled dirty gray glass, and a countenance, when unmoved, adorned with features cut in marble, or moulded in cast iron, impressing those who looked on him with the idea that for once nature had made a man without feelings or affections.
Warmth, ardour, sensibility, and the sentiment of friendship had all, however, reigned successively in the collapsed breast of that frame, of which nothing was left but the bare walls, lighted by the last flickerings of the vital spark of that intellect which had brought reflection and worn him to the bone.