During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter, and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there. And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace. One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart, and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved, his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed. Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer of the two.