I was standing with my hands tucked in my doublet, and trying ruefully enough to confront my position, when the innkeeper entered. I was hungry, yet I had no money with which to purchase a breakfast. Further, I had not a friend; I had not a home; I was in a country as foreign to me as a distant land; and I hardly dared in this predicament to turn to a stranger to crave a word of kindness. And now did I feel so tender in my years, and so plainly did I discern that my experience of mankind was insufficient for my needs, that even as I stood I felt despair spread over me in a manner that I should have thought impossible. So far was I from my valiancy of the previous evening that I nearly shed tears before the innkeeper when I mentioned to him my loss. Now here you shall mark the difference between a man who has breeding and a man who has not. No sooner did I confide my loss to the innkeeper and that I was left as penniless as a beggar, than this notorious coward, who the previous night had called for my aid, pulled the wryest mouth I ever saw and looked upon me rudely. “Does Pedro understand by this,” he said in a desperate tone of injury, “that you will not pay him for your lodging and the quantities of wine and victual you had of him last night?” “Not _will not_, landlord--_cannot_,” said I miserably, not having now the spirit to defend myself from his reproaches. “I grieve to say I have not so much as a penny in the world. The amount of my score must stand as a loan you have made to me, and I will not sleep of a night until you are repaid. I will charter a messenger to bring you your just due as soon as I can obtain it.” “Why, what words are these?” the innkeeper whined. “Loan--sleep of a night--a messenger! Oh, by the Virgin Mary, I have been robbed and cheated! Look here, you who pretend to be a gentleman, I will have it out of you. Pedro has been mishandled by such as you before this morning. And oh, good Our Lady, how he did cozen you, Pedro, when you told of this foreign cut-throat who for three weeks has used you the same.” It made my ear burn, reader, that I, Miguel Jesus Maria de Sarda y Boegas, of the sangre azul of my native Asturias, should stand before this common fellow in the light of a rogue. Yet in spite of the innkeeper’s hard words I strove to bear myself with patience and dignity, for it was ever my father’s opinion that Fortune is a capricious mistress, who will oft humiliate her wooers not so much to do them hurt, but to make proper trial of their fortitude. Yet it was not my spirit alone that was to be vexed in this affair; my body was to be mortified also. Having slept many hours, and being in the flush of a vigorous youth, I grew bitterly hungry. “Not a sip, not a crumb,” snarled the landlord, when I asked modestly enough that my breakfast and that of my horse might be scored up with the rest. Now here it was that the brave little serving-wench, who the previous evening had saved my life, came up to her master.