There is a little old man with a hump upon his shoulder who passes often in the crowd, and a sight of him always awakens this pain within me.
It is not the tragedy of senility which his extreme age pictures, nor yet the hump upon his back, which stirs my note of pain.
Years ago this man left his wife, for a price, to another who had betrayed her, and disappeared from the scene of his ignominy. When the woman was dead and her betrayer gone, the husband came back, an old man; and now, as I see him bending beneath its weight, the hump upon his shoulder seems to be labelled with this price which, in my imagination, though originally the bag of gold, has by a slow and chemically unexplained process of ossification, become a part of himself, and will grotesquely deform his skeleton a hundred years to come. When, morning and evening, I see this old man trudge laboriously, staggering always towards the left, down the street, until he disappears in the clump of willows that overshadow the cemetery gate, and I know that he is going for a lonely vigil to the grave of the dishonored woman, his lost wife, pain, keen as a Damascus blade, enters my heart.
I close my window and come in, for the night dews are falling and I am rheumatic and stiff in the legs.
So, every night, musing, I go early to my bed, but before I lie down, after my prayer is said, I rise to put fresh water in the vase of flowers, which are always fresh, beneath the picture upon my wall.
For one moment I stand and gaze into a pure, girlish face, with a pallid brow and far-away blue eyes.
She was only fifteen years old, and I twice as many, when we quarrelled like foolish children.
The day she married my brother—my youngest, best-beloved brother Benjamin—I laid this miniature, face downward, in a secret drawer of my desk.