It is a ghastly commentary. The duke undertook a fight with Time with a certainty of Time’s winning. The philosopher draws a moral from his poor remains, the loose-minded make jokes over them. Could he hear the comments on his once august body he would get up and walk out of that church, and go and bury himself somewhere in some cemetery, that he might, as he should, be forgotten once for all. The duke should have realized the fact before he had himself put in this glass case, that so far as earth goes, everything ends with death, and that efforts that men have made to perpetuate their memory have been invariably failures. The kings who built the pyramids, solid as they are, are scarcely remembered.
It was in a famous beer house in Strasburg that we met an American who was not of the regulation kind, and who, consequently, was a sweet boon.
A PHILOSOPHICAL TRAMP.
He came into the place with a slouching gait, though his manner was by no means deprecatory or humble. There was nothing in him to distinguish him from the regular tramp, except that his rum-illuminated face carried on its surface more intelligence and less brutality than the usual tramp shows, and he evidently had some idea of not bidding eternal good-bye to his respectability. Instead of the greasy wrap about the throat of the regular tramp, he had a paper collar, which he had unquestionably picked up somewhere and turned, and his coat was buttoned up carefully to conceal the painfully evident absence of a shirt, a deceit the confirmed tramp would scorn to practice. And then he wore a tall hat, and had made attempts to brush it, and his carriage, when he knew he was observed, was bold and defiant, and not cringing or slouching.
He sat down at the table with us, and commenced conversation with some remarks about the weather, some original remarks concerning the state of trade, and from that he glided with a grace that was to be commended into a disquisition as to the effect upon the commerce of the world of the building of a ship-canal across the Isthmus, and likewise the effect it would have upon the climate of the United States, ending his conversation with the request of the loan of a dollar.
“How happens it,” I asked, “that a man informed as you are, with your evident education and your general information should be borrowing dollars in this way?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said he; “I have not borrowed dollars, as yet, though I hope to. You have, as yet, made no response to my modest appeal. But why am I thus? Can you tell? Can I tell? Who is responsible for what happens to him? Who can control tastes? Who can analyze that subtle and unknown thing we call mind?”
“But who are you, anyhow?”
“I am a graduate of Harvard, sir, and a son of one of the once wealthiest men in Boston.”
“Why this condition of things, then?”