In a passionate burst of enthusiasm, I tore off my slouched hat and hurled it from me. It felt like the badge of some ignoble slavery, and I determined to endure it no longer. The noise of the act called up a voice from the inner room, and a man, to all appearance suddenly roused from sleep, stood at the door. He was evidently young, but poverty, dissipation, and raggedness made the question of his age a difficult one to solve. A light-coloured moustache and beard covered all the lower part of his face, and his long blonde hair fell heavily over his shoulders.
‘Well,’ cried he, half angrily, ‘what’s the matter; are you so impatient that you must smash the furniture?’
Although the words were spoken as correctly as I have written them, they were uttered with a foreign accent; and, hazarding the stroke, I answered him in French by apologising for the noise.
‘What! a Frenchman,’ exclaimed he, ‘and in that dress! what can that mean?’
‘If you’ll shut your door, and cut off pursuit of me, I’ll tell you everything,’ said I, ‘for I hear the voices of people coming down that street in front.’
‘I’ll do better,’ said he quickly; ‘I’ll upset the bridge, and they cannot come over.’
‘That’s done already,’ replied I; ‘I shoved it into the stream as I passed.’
He looked at me steadily for a moment without speaking, and then approaching close to me, said, ‘Parbleu! the act was very unlike your costume!’ At the same time he shut the door, and drew a strong bar across it. This done, he turned to me once more—‘Now for it: who are you, and what has happened to you?’
‘As to what I am,’ replied I, imitating his own abruptness, ‘my dress would almost save the trouble of explaining; these Albany folk, however, would make a field-preacher of me, and to escape them I took to flight.’
‘Well, if a fellow will wear his hair that fashion, he must take the consequence,’ said he, drawing out my long lank locks as they hung over my shoulders. ‘And so you wouldn’t hold forth for them—not even give them a stave of a conventicle chant.’ He kept his eyes riveted on me as he spoke, and then seizing two pieces of stick from the firewood, he beat on the table the rataplan of the French drum. ‘That’s the music you know best, lad, eh?—that’s the air, which, if it has not led heavenward, has conducted many a brave fellow out of this world at least. Do you forget it?’