As I walked and praised myself thus, my heart felt warm again. If other people had been praising me, I must needs have been ashamed, and motioned them away with my hand, but I can listen to myself without blushing, and I should perhaps have gone on praising myself and have discovered other amiable traits in my character, had I not stepped with my half-soles--heaven knows, I had worn away the other half on the road to the soup-kitchen--stepped with my half-soles right into the mud. "Those who are engaged in a religious mission come to no hurt!..." but that is probably on the way out. On the way home, when the newly-created angel is hastening heavenward, one may break one's neck. My feet are wet, and I feel chilled all through. I know to a certainty that I shall catch cold, that I have caught cold already. Presently I shall be coughing my heart out, and I feel a sting in my chest. A terror comes over me. It is not long since I spent four weeks in bed. "It's not a thing to do," I say to myself by way of reproach; "no, certainly not! It's all very well as far as _you_ are concerned, but what about your wife and child? What right have you to imperil their support?" If the phrase had been a printed one, and I the reader of it with my pencil in my hand, I should have known what to do--but the phrase was my own. I feel more and more chilled, and home is distant, and my goloshes are full of water, cold and heavy. The windows of a confectioner gleam brightly in front of me--it is the worst in all Warsaw--their tea is shocking--but since there is no choice! I rush across the street and plunge into a warm mist. I order a glass of tea and take up a comic paper. The first illustrated joke that caught my eye was like a reflection of the state of things outside. The joke was called: "Which has too much?" The weather in the picture is the weather out of doors. Two persons are advancing toward each other on the pavement. From one side comes a stout, middle-aged woman, well-nourished, in a silk dress, a satin cloak, and a white hat with feathers. She must have started on her walk, or to make a visit, in fine weather, and now she has been caught by the rain. Her face is one of dismay. She dreads the rain and the wind, if not for herself, at least for her hat. She hastens--drops of perspiration appear on her white forehead--she hastens, but her steps are unsteady: both her hands are taken up. In the left she holds the end of her silken train, already spattered with mud, and in the right, a tiny silk parasol that scarcely covers the feathered hat on her head. She _only_ requires a larger umbrella. To make up for that she has enough and to spare of everything else, her face is free from care, it tells only of an abundance of all good things.