Yet no doubt it had its tragedies, this seemingly peaceful and sequestered spot: indeed signs of most pathetic tragedies came under my own eyes, few as were the hours which I spent in it. Hanging about the unpretentious hostelry about which those uncouth youths gathered, were two specimens of what was once humanity that made the heart ache to look on. One was a case, I think, hopeless: a gaunt and dirty figure, his last drink still dripping from his beard, clothed in the vilest of shirts, and in things that were once trousers, which last hung loose over large and faded carpet slippers, he moved disgust as well as pity. The other was of a different class. Drink had been his bane also, but there was not in his face that absence of all shame, that despair merging into careless defiance, which stamped his fellow-sufferer's case as beyond the cure of man. They called him "Doc," and there were still evidences of birth and education upon his bloated features. What had driven him thus far? I could not help but conjecture. Was there a woman at the bottom of it? If so, where and what was she now? Somebody else's.... But this was idle guesswork. There was yet another case, a woman herself this time, still more tragic. Her motto, stamped upon every feature, expressed in every gesture, was "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." A tall, dark, and once handsome spinster, a _femme de trente ans_, she waited upon us at table; but with such an air of utter indifference, with such complete abstraction from things material and ephemeral, that she awed the very persons to whose wants she ministered. Her face wore a settled and unaltering expression of something missed yet never to that day for one moment forgotten. A machine could not have carried plates and moved dishes with more unfailing stolidity. Her thoughts were remotely away in the past, and it seemed as if nothing, nothing upon all this earth, could fetch them back. Cato's statue would have smiled as soon as she. It was pathetic in the extreme. One longed to give her if but one moment's peace of mind. Did she _never_ forget? What was it she brooded on? How long would the feminine heart and brain stand that strain? Tragedies! Yes, there were tragedies there, as everywhere else. § 39