While I had been looking at this man, I had also been insensibly led to compare myself, as I stood on the pavement, with my oratorical vagrant, as he stood in the roadway. In some important respects, I found, to my own astonishment, that the result of the comparison was not by any means flattering on my side. I might certainly assume, without paying myself any extraordinary compliment, that I was the honester man of the two; also that I was better educated and a little better clad. But here my superiority ceased. The beggar was far in advance of me in all the outward and visible signs of inward mental comfort which combine to form the appearance of a healthily-constituted man. After perplexing myself, for some time, in the attempt to discover the reason for the enviably prosperous and contented aspect of this vagabond--which appeared palpably to any sharp observer, through his assumed expression of suffering and despair--I came to the singular conclusion that the secret of his personal advantages over me, lay in the very circumstance on which he chiefly relied for awakening the sympathies of the charitable public--the circumstance of his having no friends. "No friends!" I repeated to myself, as I walked away. "Happily-situated vagrant! there is the true cause of your superiority over me--you have no friends! But can the marvellous assertion be true? Can this enviable man really go home and touch up his speech for to-morrow, with the certainty of not being interrupted? I am going home to finish an article, without knowing whether I shall have a clear five minutes to myself, all the time I am at work. Can he take his money back to his drawer, in broad daylight, and meet nobody by the way who will say to him, 'Remember our old friendship, and lend me a trifle'? I have money waiting for me at my publisher's, and I dare not go and fetch it, except under cover of the night. Is that spoilt child of fortune, from whom I have just separated myself, really and truly never asked to parties and obliged to go to them? He has a button on his coat--I am positively certain I saw it--and is there no human finger and thumb to lay hold of it, and no human tongue to worry him, the while? He does not live in the times of the pillory, and he has his ears--the lucky wretch. Have those organs actually enjoyed the indescribable blessedness of freedom from the intrusion of 'well-meant advice'? Can he write--and has he got no letters to answer? Can he read--and has he no dear friend's book to get through, whether he likes it or not? No wonder that he looks prosperous and healthy, though he lives in a dingy slum, and that I look peevish and pale, though I reside on gravel, in an airy neighbourhood. Good Heavens! does he dare to speak of his misfortunes, when he has no calls to make? Irrational Sybarite! what does he want next, I wonder?" * * * * *