"It must have been ten years after this, that, one night as I was coming out of the Opera, I felt a gentle pull at my coat, and, turning round, I saw Nat Hartmann. I knew him in an instant, though he was utterly changed from my friend of years before. All his colour was gone; his face was thin and pinched and haggard; his eyes sunk deep in his head; his lips, which had been so full and ruddy, were now thin and pallid. I stepped aside to satisfy myself that it was he; then I made him get into my brougham, and drove him to my rooms. To my dying day I shall never forget that man's appearance as he stood in his thin, wretched clothes, under the lamplight; I shall never forget the manner in which he rushed to the fireplace, knelt down on the rug, and spread out his transparent hands to the blaze; I shall never forget the manner in which he gulped down the wine which I handed to him, or the ravenous way in which he tore at the food. When he had eaten and drank, had warmed himself, and nature seemed revived within him, I talked to him, and bit by bit managed to drag from him his story. He was a long time telling it, and it was disconnected and jerky to a degree, interspersed with loud railing at fortune, with sighs and tears, and dolorous ejaculations, and I had a hard task to follow him; but I gleaned from him this: His first downward step had been caused by his having married a Christian girl, a singer at the Grand Opera in Vienna, with whom he fell desperately in love. This had so exasperated his relatives, that after trying, by every means in their power, to prevent the marriage, when they found it had actually taken place, they repudiated him, and did every thing possible to ruin him and his wife. One of the principal Jewish bankers, who had originally introduced Hartmann to the Imperial notice, now became his bitterest enemy, used the influence which had formerly been exerted in the young man's favour to debase him, and finally, under some pretext, got him removed from his position as leader of the Emperor's private band. From that time onward misfortune seemed to have seized him; his wife, after a long illness, died in childbirth, leaving him with one little girl. In his misery he took to drinking, and sunk from bad to worse. One night, while drunk, he struck an officer who had mocked his playing, and, to save his life, fled with his little child to England. He had been in London a week, and had haunted the streets in the hope of meeting me; and the meeting was only just in time, by George! for he and his little child were nearly starved.